Wednesday, June 3, 2009

World Cup Asia 2009 - Singapore Paintball



World Cup Asia (WCA) 2009... Asia's premier paintball event is back again... My first trip to the WCA was in 2006 when I went to KL with a friend to witness the event. The word here is "to witness"... WCA 2006 was also the first time that I was fully exposed to competitive paintball or commonly known as speedball. With zero knowledge of what competitive paintball is all about, everything I saw was new... I didnt know who Oliver Lang was and I didnt know what a dorito was and I didnt know who were playing in the event and that was 3 years ago...

In 2007, my team participated in the event and became the first Singapore paintball team to fly the Singapore flag in WCA. Well... I will be the first to admit that not all of our players were Singaporeans but still, we were playing under the banner of "Singapore" as almost all of the Malaysians playing in the team have worked in Singapore at some time of their life... except for Shaf. But we didnt really care... We couldnt care less if we were not performing in the regular league, we couldnt care less what was coming and we couldnt be bothered with who we had to play. We just want to be part of the event. Of course, reality hit us bad when we did badly in WCA 2007. We ate the humble pie...

In 2008, there were 2 "Singaporean" teams...my team, Red Sevens and a newly formed team, Team Damnation. After a few months of paintballing and a newly found sponsor with Kee Action, Team Damnation became the second "Singapore" team to play in WCA. I mentioned "Singapore" with inverted commas because they too was not a complete Singaporean team. Both our teams did fairly well... but still there were only 2 teams from Singapore. Another local team, PSG Warfreakz participated in the event too but still not a truely Singapore team.

With the November WCA09 approaching, we would have played WCA three times and yes, still in the 3rd Division. I am hearing news that there will be more Singapore teams this year. Maybe 5 teams from 2 Divisions (3rd and 4th Divisions) will be a good number to justify the development of speedball in Singapore. While Singapore speedball teams are growing slowly in numbers, scenario paintball (woodsball) are picking up the trend.

Can we grow from a mere number 5 to a contingent of Singaporean paintballers? I think the answer is YES! A national team for paintball perhaps...? Anyone?

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