Is Paintball a Sport or Hobby?

There will be a debate that will never end as long as paintball exists, and the debate is over whether or not paintball is a sport. A lot of people don’t even view paintball as something that should be legal let alone a sport, but those could be the same people who decided that dominoes or the spelling bee should be shown on a sports network (ESPN).

Your view is probably decided by what you think the definition of a sport is, the dictionary lists fourteen different possibilities for the definition. The most prudent being the first, which defines it as any activity that requires skill or physical prowess and often competitive in nature. Now if you use that definition paintball is a sport, it obviously requires skill or there would be no learning curve, and there would be no need to separate the national tournaments into divisions. As far as physical prowess goes, paintball players are some of the best conditioned athletes around, especially those that play the increasingly popular format of X-Ball. By the end of a match of X-Ball if you’re not in good condition you will be on the brink of exhaustion. Unlike the traditional format of paintball X-Ball is broken into halves of play that are twenty minutes long each, and after each point is scored teams only have one minute to regroup, refill air tanks, hoppers, pods, clean masks off, clean off any hits and be back at the dead box for the game start. And when you’re playing that fast of a game on a 125’x150’ field there are no breaks in the match where you can walk or jog from bunker to bunker.

The field may sound large but when you have five markers firing fifteen balls per second at 250+ feet per second, it’ll seem like your in a closet trying to avoid being hit. So once again to compete you better have the physical ability to sprint, not jog or even slightly run, for all forty minutes. Now comes the ultimate factor in the argument to make it a sport, and that’s the teamwork element. A lot of people believe that teamwork of some form is essential to a sport, and paintball is the epiphany of teamwork. Just like hockey or football, paintball has its very own superstars, but unlike those sports the superstars alone can rarely win you a match or a tournament. It takes the dedication, hard work, practice, communication and execution of set game plans by all five or all seven people on the field to win a match.

Now for those that say its not a sport, let’s be honest you really have very little basis for your claim. As said above it obviously takes skill and practice to become halfway decent at it let alone great, you can’t just go out one day buy a marker and equipment and compete at the top level of the sport just like you can’t just go out and play in the NFL or NHL. And the game itself is half mental, you cannot win if you go into a match with the stereotypical “you go this way, I’ll go that way” mentality. You have to walk the field and game plan just like you have to for any other sport. It takes a combination of physical and mental abilities of the team as a whole to win a game and more so a tournament.