The sound of small arms fire shattered what had been a lazy Sunday afternoon. Two groups of armed men were seen firing at each other and then diving for cover behind what appeared to be inflatable multi-colored obstacles to avoid the returning fire from their opposition.
Rounds blanketed the sky and ricocheted off everything that stood upright. Those who were not fortunate enough to dodge the projectiles were covered with half-dollar sized paint blotches and were forced to leave the field of play.
Sunday, the K-State paintball team held its last practice before heading to the Dallas area for the National College Paintball Association's eighth-annual USA College Paintball National Championships this weekend. The team, which barely missed a championship trophy last year, is confident it will bring home the first-place hardware this time.
Reflecting on this season's success at other tournaments, Darran McEuen, the team's public relations representative, said he had no doubts about the team's chances of succeeding in the Lone Star State.
"Two weekends ago, we went up to Iowa, up in Council Bluffs. Nebraska was holding a tournament, and we pretty much steamrolled everybody at that event," McEuen said.
McEuen said he believed these recent successes put the team right back on track to be in the championship game this year.
The K-State paintball team was a thing of the past until McEuen, a fifth-year student in electrical engineering, came along and resurrected it his freshman year.
In a matter of only a few years, he not only had the team back on campus, but he also has it thriving. Team member Trapper Callender, junior in anthropology, said he came to K-State mainly to play on McEuen's resurgent squad.
Callender is not alone. McEuen said the team has no problem getting graduating high-school students from all over the state and also a couple from out of state to come and try out for the team.
"K-State is pretty much the only real school to go to if you want to play paintball in college," he said.
McEuen will lead his teammates to Nationals where they will play in a round-robin style tournament against at least 27 other college teams from around the nation.
The tournament features five-minute rounds in which two teams go head-to-head in a scramble to collect the most points. A team can collect up to 100 points throughout the competition. Points are awarded for the number of people the team has surviving at the end of the match and the number of opponents they have eliminated by the end of the game. The item worth the most points is a flag that sits in the middle of the field. The team that gets the flag earns points, and if it can get it to its opponents' start box, it collects additional points.
McEuen said the K-State paintball team's strategy is simple.
"Shoot everybody out, and then get the flag, because you want all of the points you can get," said McEuen.
For many players, paintball can be a love-hate relationship.
For Callender, having paintballs shot at him at a rate of 15 balls per second is more than enough to send his adrenaline level into overdrive, he said. On the downside, the game can take a toll on the body. Callender said he once dislocated his shoulder during practice.
Serious injuries are rare, but anyone who has been struck in the head by a frozen paintball can attest to the fact that playing the game can be painful even without breaking or dislocating something, Callender said.
Nationals on Saturday and Sunday will bring the team's season to a close. It will resume official practices and tryouts during the first few weeks of the fall semester. McEuen said anyone is welcome to come out and play, but the team takes its competitions seriously, so anyone interested had better bring his or her A-game.
