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Words: Jeff Stein, New England Hurricanes
So you’ve got no rep and no money, just a desire to get your team into the inner circle of top Pros. Hard? Yes. Impossible? No. Jeff Stein tells you how…
Back in the day, the Hurricanes were a Novice 10-man team and we'd get two Pro games each event. We got to play Ground Zero, Camp Tigers, TonTons, Lockout, Image, Fury and others, and that was the highlight of our weekend. I remember a stretch of time in 2001 when we played the All Americans three events in a row. After the third time - a brutal loss where we shot only two Americans as they marched down the field in less than three minutes - Adam Gardner said to me, "Hey, you guys are doing better against us." I pointed out the final score, and he said, "Yeah, but I didn't say doing well, I said better."
I had always known that eventually the divisions would be locked, that they would not allow teams to play Pro just by paying a higher entry fee in perpetuity. Sooner or later the curtain would drop and you'd either be on the inside or forever damned to the outside. It is the natural order of things. I'd always felt I was in a race against time, with an uncertain deadline for going Pro, and with prodding from Carmen Borgia (and funding from Redz) and more than a little luck, the Hurricanes made the jump at the last possible moment.
What the heck did I know? I was the captain of a Novice team. As far as I knew, Pro teams got everything they wanted and it was easy and free. I figured that you called a sponsor and said, "We need such and such amount of money," and the sponsor said, "We'll give you twice that, just in case, because you're Pro and that's really, really important to us." Well, maybe that's how it works for Dynasty, but it's not how it works for the vast majority of teams.
There is no equality in the Pro ranks. Just like everywhere else in Paintball there are the haves and the have-nots. Some teams, like Dynasty and XSV are rich, while some teams, like the Hurricanes, are poor. This has always been the case. Lockout used to put six people in a hotel room, even though they were a Pro team.
Make no mistake about it; money is the foundation on which a Pro team runs. You need the money to get (and keep) players while you need the players to have success and get the money. Once you've primed that pump, success will bring you more players and more money. If you start with great players and no money, you end up as a feeder team - providing the wealthier teams with great talent. If you start off without good players or much money, then you really don't have much of anything at all. The Hurricanes have always had to subsist with less money than the big dogs. Consequently, we've had to watch as players leave our program for other teams. And yet we are expected by our fans and sponsors, (and ourselves) to be competitive.
So how do we combat this? How do we survive and build for long-term success without the ability to buy players and fly all over the world for practices, all the while facing the specter of losing core players each winter?
First off, we carefully build the chemistry of the team. If a cancerous element develops, it is cut loose. In the past, The Hurricanes have made the mistake of hoping that a bad egg fixes himself and we've always ended up regretting not taking matters into our own hands. Consequently, team management and the veteran players understand the necessity of avoiding certain personality types.
We try to internally focus players’ loyalty, building a strong sense of unity and community so that the players have a loyalty to each other. Go read Emile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society, paying special attention to the theory of Mechanical Solidarity - the idea that we define ‘us’ best by identifying what is not ‘us’. We understand the importance of loyalty amongst the players, even at the expense of loyalty to the team itself. The team is an abstract, a concept. Certainly, I’d like players to be proud of the Hurricanes, to be proud to be a part of the Hurricanes and to identify, individually and collectively, with the ideals of the team, but it’s as important to me that they maintain a strong affinity to each other. The bond between friends is far stronger than the bond between an employee and an employer.
We try to select players with a strong loyalty to something that is unique to the Hurricanes; ideally to the players on the team or if not that then the team and the history that we represent in New England - or even to the region itself. There are some players who can’t travel for practices, therefore if we picked them up our investment is more protected. If the player is capable of and willing to relocate or fly every weekend, they are more likely to look further afield for a team, or accept offers from out-of-state teams. This is not the same thing as accepting package deals. On principle, we don’t. We do not want a team of cliques; that breeds politics and infighting. We want the eight musketeers…all for one and one for all.
We look for players who are intelligent. We want more than just ‘Paintball lifestyle bums’ but instead people who have a more mature understanding of how the world works. We value loyalty and honesty, trustworthiness and respectfulness. We want players who will professionally represent the team and our sponsors. And we try to focus on players who we believe will make long-term commitments of two or three years.
If there are two players, A and B, and you could rank them both on a scale of 1-10 (10 being a superstar and 1 being a newbie), where player A is an eight but had jumped from team to team over the course of the years and had a bad attitude; while player B was a six but had a strong sense of loyalty, commitment, team ‘ownership’ and an eagerness to learn, the Hurricanes would opt for player B and would work to groom him to the level we require him to be at.
This means that we need to build our own players; we need to find talent and potential and cultivate it (mostly in-house). The Hurricane system has become successful at taking players and turning them into professionals. Which is not to say that we’ve been successful at turning players into superstars or in putting together an entire roster that has been capable of winning, but there are ex-Hurricanes on Doc’s Raiders and Miami Raiders, NYX, Infamous, Bob Long and Arsenal. Over the course of the last seven years we have only twice recruited players who had not come up with the Hurricanes but had significant professional experience coming into the team.
So, we find players who fit a personality profile, we train them up and make them Pros. That is as far as our system can take them. Find the right person, give him the right skills and then throw him into the mix. Hopefully the end result is a team that is loyal to each other and to the team itself, that is dedicated to practicing, that has the requisite skills to compete at the Pro level and hopefully chemistry exists, a spark flies, the fire ignites and the team begins to excel.
Players are not commodities. They have changing goals and desires and the team needs to have an understanding of the half-life of players. We figure three years. We know we are a team with low funds, so we are not going to keep our players forever, so we expect two years and hope for three. We need to be able to groom a player to where we need him very quickly because we expect that he’s going to be gone three years to the day that we find him. That gives us limited time to make him what we want and get value back out of the relationship for the team. If we lose him before two years are up, it's a bad investment (although, if he leaves that fast, he probably didn’t fit the personality profile). If he stays for more than three, we pat ourselves on the back for doing a great job drafting him - we’ve found someone who became a foundation for the team and who should help us build even further.
It’s great that the core of Dynasty has stayed together as long as they have, but that’s Dynasty. I don’t think you can copy them because they're one-of-a-kind, and look at what's happened with Oliver now, every team will face that.
If the Hurricanes roster of today exists in three years time, we will be a top four team. That is our goal - to be a top four team with as realistic a shot of playing for first at any given event as any other team. Right now, we are a top eight team, so how do we plan to make that leap?
The first step is increased sponsorship. 2006 will be the first year where the Hurricanes have a budget that is sufficient not to limit our activities. I’m not saying we’ll be attending 15 events, but we can attend the full NPPL season, travel to some practices and think about playing some one-off events like Bunkerfest or CalJam. Going forward, we are going to try to increase the sponsorship that the team receives from the Paintball industry by a marginal percentage each year. If we can realize a 15% growth each year, I’ll be happy. In addition to that, we’ll keep going after non-industry sponsors. This is a study in rejection. If I send out 50 letters, I’ll be lucky if 25 of the companies even bother to call to reject me, but that doesn’t mean you should give up. The industry may not be growing but Paintball’s profile is; we have more television and mainstream exposure today than ever before, so we’ll keep trying to entice outside sponsorship.
In addition to improving our finances, we are actively trying to reduce player churn. We are putting more emphasis on long-term investments in players, placing more importance on finding players who will stay with the team for three or four years, allowing us to develop more consistency and momentum going from season to season. To support this, we are looking to build a farm system, incorporating teams at the D1 and Semi-Pro level so that we can help actively manage more players for more time and make sure that they are ready for the Pro team when they get promoted there.
Finally, we are looking to amalgamate with another team so as to provide critical mass to our organization, by finding an ally who may be able to provide funding, players, infrastructure (other teams we can help stock with players) and other opportunities. Many of the teams at the upper echelons of this sport play in both the NPPL and the NXL - maybe we can find the right ally to allow us that same opportunity (which would help us attract better players if we ever wanted to go the ‘free agent’ route).
The challenge for us has been rebuilding each off-season; losing three players every winter and having to start from scratch for Huntington Beach. We spend half the year getting back to where we were, and then only have half the year left to try to take the next step. Many of the players who leave do so because of sponsorship. Or, to put it a little more bluntly, because of money. We have never paid our players before and when an 18-year-old kid is being offered $5000 a year versus nothing, it’s hard to justify staying true to your morals.
The Hurricanes finished last year ranked eighth, ahead of Infamous. Over the course of the winter, the London Tigers have sold their Pro spot to the Philly Americans, Avalanche broke up and subsequently rebuilt themselves and Nexus have been seriously debating even playing in the NPPL, not to mention the travails undergone by Strange, Legacy and NYX. It is possible to do this without a six-digit budget. You have to stay on your toes and stay smart, but it is possible.
We have to believe that it takes more than a disconnected collection of all-star players, that mercenaries cannot subjugate their ego and super-ego for the betterment of the team. That real success has to be built, not bought. When you look at the top teams of the past few years, we see that the success of those forged from friendship (Dynasty, Avalanche, Naughty Dogs, Trauma) exceeds that of teams forged by money (XSV, Arsenal, Legacy).
We’ll take some losses, we always expect to, but we’ll find new players that exist under the radar of other teams. We’ll turn them into Pros and we’ll begin the climb up the ladder again. And eventually, I hope, we’ll reach the top rung…
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The Inner Sanctum
