Here’s an interesting writeup from one of the established University teams here in Ontario. The Catshack Reports took the liberty of contacting Ms. Meagan Visser, current head of the Mustangs Paintball Club of the University of Western Ontario. Her submission to the Catshack is as follows.
First and foremost, from my understanding, the Mustang Paintball club at the University of Western Ontario was started back around 2002 by a couple of students who were interested in simply having fun playing paintball in a group with any other interested students. With permission from the University Student Council, these students began putting together paintball outings and general meetings to discuss the sport. The early years of the club saw a bit of disorganization and was relatively small, but grew in popularity over the years. With the right students managing and promoting paintball as a fun, social, group activity, the club became more attractive to students.
I joined the Mustang Paintball club in my first year back in 2006. I had played paintball often back home and was very interested in meeting and making new friends by using paintball as a common interest. The club environment is inhabited by a wide variety of players, from tournament style players, woods ballers, first timers and those who prefer to play just to have a good time. A majority of club members have preferred to play just for fun, and that therefore is our main goal as a club executive team. Several attempts have been made to put together a competitive team to participate in local tournaments at Flagswipe Paintball, however these have been found to be successful for brief amounts of time before players get too busy with school or are financially burdened. Therefore our focus in terms of club funding has been for providing opportunities for the overall majority of the club instead of focusing on strongly supporting only a few players. Attempts over the years to organize a competitive team with the university have not been successful as the other sporting activities seem to be put above others.
We aim to hold a minimum of 
one event/game per month, alternating between indoor and outdoor venues. We were previously engaged with a variety of outdoor venues such as outer limits, adrenaline, and area 51, however we have now grown accustomed with our friends at Flagswipe who have been great to us over the years. Each game will bring out a different crowd, with some regulars but usually always some new to paintball interested in giving it a try. Apart from painting up the field on a regular basis, we also hold general meetings, such as pizza nights or pub nights, giving members an opportunity to come out and meet other club members interested in paintball. Our goal is not only to just play paintball, but also have a good time and create a great social atmosphere that is usually associated with the sport. There really aren’t too many better ways to make a new friend than by painting up your opponents or each other on the field. From personal experience, I ended up having two roommates throughout several years in school that I met having fun through the paintball club.
Highlights of the year for the Mustang Paintball club include Flagswipe’s big outdoor games, especially “Day of the Dead” every October. It is usually always our highest turn out for the year and is timed perfectly with the beginning of the school year. Although it usually falls on home coming weekend, we always get people out because they know its an awesome day of paintball fun. Outdoor games in general are usually always a highlight as it gives members an opportunity to get out of the city for an afternoon of paintball and socializing whether it be in the fall or at our snow filled winter games. We usually like to try out new types of games too anything that involves a costume or dressing up is usually always great, as well as playing night games.
Our year end indoor tournament is usually always a highlight too because members are given the opportunity to play in a tournament like setting for fun, and we always include great prizes for everyone.
As mentioned before, we do not have a competitive team set up, though it looks promising for the future as more students are joining the club that are interested in tournament style of play. Overall, club members, now with around 150 of them this year, come from a variety of backgrounds, though there tends to be a lot of science and social science students. Our exec this year I believe consists of many backgrounds including visual arts, genetics, psychology, business, engineering, english, and law, which is great cause everyone can bring a unique set of ideas and such to managing and promoting the club.
For me the paintball has always been a great way to bring a group of people together to engage in an unique activity with a common goal. That adrenaline rush when you hit the field with a team or group, anticipating the blow of the ref’s whistle or that first welt or the elimination of that first opponent really gets the blood pumping. Being able to share a moment with a stranger who by the end of the session is probably a new friend is always great. We always have a few members who push the envelope with creativity and really generate some memorable moments. At Day of the Dead a few years ago, a bunch of us dressed up as characters from Alice in Wonderland and had a mock tea party in the middle of the crematorium area.. our opponents were more confused by us then interested in painting us. I remember one guy walking by looking at our white rabbit and red queen and being like WTF? call us unconventional or whatever but by the end of the day we came away with a Tippmann X7 for the costume prize which we have auctioned off in order to support the club. Moments like that or charging across the field as a band of pirates or watching a girl wear nothing but a life guard bathing suit in November firing paint at the opposition, are difficult to find anywhere other than at a Paintball club event. Overall, its the team building social experience of paintball that has kept me playing through four years of university. I started out playing in a small bush behind the house at home with my brothers and a few close friends. it became a tradition every other week or once a month to have a BBQ and have people over for some ball in the bush. planning and building bunkers, cleaning brush and weeds, all the hard work involved in developing an always evolving field, again a group atmosphere experience hard to find anywhere else.
We have yet to do any charity based work with the club, however it is something
that we have discussed and look forward to doing in the future. Right now our goal is to maintain our current itinerary for a year to year basis that future exec members can easily maintain and build upon. charity work would be great to include in the future, as well as the development and support of a competitive team. As a recreational/ just for fun player like myself as organizer, I am slightly biased to continuing the paintball atmosphere of a group of people socializing and playing paintball just for fun that I have grown to expect from the sport. I hope that a future president or organizer can build upon the strong foundation that has been developed over the past 4 years by some great, fearless leaders who have been engulfed by the passion of paintball just as much if not more than I have. Perhaps a speedball tournament style leader would be the next best step for Mustang Paintball.
For the rest of our season, which tends to finish up in April when the main school year ends, we plan on hitting up Flagswipe’s 30 Days of Night game at the end of February. From there it will be indoor games at Flagswipe in London finishing off with our Year end ‘fun gun’ tournament and the election of next year’s executive team. We’ll probably throw in a pub night or two for good measure. Its been a great ride after four years. I’ve met some insane people and we’ve all shared some crazy fun moments. I can only hope that this great atmosphere is carried on into the future.
To learn more about the University of Western Ontario Mustangs Paintball Club please visit http://www.usc.uwo.ca/clubs/paintball/
