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Josh: What teams have you played
for and what led you to playing with
CEP?
James: Once getting to Paintball Central I
was educated on the fact that there are all
sorts of styles of paintball. The field hosted
multiple air ball and speed ball fields along
with woods, mounds, and pipes fields. The
field also had an absolutely nuts Sunday advanced crowd. I was lucky. After a few open
group Saturday visits at the paintball field me
my brother and dad took our noob selves to
our very first Sunday of paintball with the “advanced ballers.”
All day I got so shot up. The game was athletic. The game was mental. Players were mean
yet friends and it was raw like walking into a
jungle. Paintball was about who could stand
out and be the most badass player. And I was
14! I loved it.
WcK stands for Wild Crazy Kid. The original
people, Trauma, who earned the nickname
were a bunch of ballers at such a young,
young age at the time. And it was stories like
that around Paintball Central that pushed me
to have the dreams and the drive to learn and
love paintball.
I loved that field and from the first time I ever
went there that was the only place I dreamed
of being. At the paintball field with all my
friends just ballin.
My family kept going back about twice a
month to the paintball field and I eventually
made enough friends and respect among
them to hop on my first team. And then some.
I played for:
Mebane Velocity - 3man CFOA 05
Team Blaze - 5man CFOA 06
Original Raiden - 5man CFOA 06
Gridlock - Xball PSP 07
The Lost Boys - Race to CFOA 09
After playing for local teams for a while and
the breaking up of team gridlock I called it
quits for a two, three long year gap. A lot of
my good friends had stopped playing so I just
didn’t play either. I was working a lot and just
spinning my wheels in life and I had just broken up with a serious girlfriend and I realized:
“what am I doing in my life?” I wasn’t happy
in college at the time as a freshman. So I left
school and got a job full time. I wasn’t fully
enjoying what I did at work every day but I did
it for a while. The job was good I was young
and my family was there but something was
missing.
So I recalled to when I broke up with the
close ex-girlfriend of mine. She reminded
me of how much I always would blab on and
talk about paintball and how she could tell
that it was always on my mind. In our parting
seconds she told me to start playing again.
I needed to hear from a friend that I should
do what I love, and like that I did. I bought
a Proto Matrix 2007 from my little brother
and called up my best friends to play with
me again. Because if you are going to play
paintball you do it with your best friends. We
called ourselves Goonsquad - race to NCXL
and 5man CFOA aka one amazing team.
Goonsquad was great because it was strictly
fun and great paintball play! We would go ball
hard all day long then end with a milkshake
and a burger at our favorite restaurant called
Andy’s. I love those guys and if I wasn’t currently playing ball with them I never would
have been even close to ready to answer the
call for CEP tryouts and make the team.
When I found out about tryouts for Chattanooga CEP I knew this was my chance to pick up
paintball again for real. So I drove 7 hours to
tryouts with some friends and tried my be