How to get new players in to the sport?

In Wiltshire area , click on my picture ? but have everyone from around the South = from Brighton to Bristol, even a few at Birmingham, own site at Didcot A34

I'm based partially in Reading and the rest of the time in Sussex

Ok, I'll preface this comment by saying that I'm not a serious player, I've played on and off for about the last 5 years, so don't jump all over me here!

Firstly, I would want to see information being more accessible. A website set up which is very clear, displays all the information that somebody would need to learn more about the game and find ways to get into it. So on this site you would have info about woodsball and tourneys, a list of walkon sites around the country so people could easily find their nearest site, contact details (even if it's just an email address) for as many teams as possible, clear information about kit with recommendations for good starter kit. Just a way for people to find out everything they need to on one site.

Secondly, get paintball sites actively pushing people towards that website. Any punter who expresses an interest in playing more gets pointed towards the site, so that way instead of people just enjoying it and choosing to go a bit more frequently you might see more people who enjoy it learning more about the game and being converted into getting properly involved.

Thirdly, have people being more generous with their kit. Obviously most players wouldn't be happy letting newbies use nice kit, but how many of us have a cheap(ish) backup lying around that we never use? Would it be difficult to take any spare kit that you don't use along to walkons and let new players use it? Obviously you run the risk of them damaging it, but it might be possible for site owners to take a deposit from players who are borrowing kit, so if it does get damaged then they can't do a runner.

Fourthly, stop intimidating new players. Too often I've seen guys appear on here, looking to get more involved and asking what kit to buy, and they then get bombarded with information and arguments, and it just gets too intimidating. One person will recommend something like an Etek, cheap & cheerful, easy to use, easy to maintain, and a perfect starter marker, so somebody else jumps in and says they are too old and heavy so recommends an Ego7 (for double the price), and it just keeps going, so instead of the new guy having a clear idea in his head of what he can buy for £300, he gets a huge list of kit with prices ranging wildly, and gets put off by the fact that he's seen prices for "starter kit" several hundred pounds over his original budget. If you look at how many people post up saying they are new and asking for advice, and see how many of them actually buy kit, it's surprising poor.

Fifthly, make it easier for new guys to get a taste of tournament play. If a newbie gets in touch with your team asking about it, invite them along to a training session, pool together enough kit to enable them to play, and make it cheaper for them. Let's be honest, are they going to shoot more than a case of paint in a day? Not likely, so get your team to chuck in a pound each, even if there's only 10 of you it knocks the cost to the new guy down to £10. If they show an interest in tournaments then let them get a taste without charging them full whack. Let's be honest here, a brand new player is going to spend the vast, vast majority of their first tournament sat on the sidelines after being shot out early, so don't treat them like an experienced player. Take them along as an extra guy, let them play a few games, but don't charge them an equal fee for the day. Your team is already going to be paying the entry fee, and without the new guy you'd still have the same cost, so ask him for £20/30 towards the cost and then a contribution towards paint. It'll save your players a few quid and makes the day affordable for the new guy. My first tourney I paid well over £100 for the day and I don't think I lasted more than 2 minutes in any single match. If it wasn't for the fact I was only just 17 and still daft about money it could very easily have put me off permanently.

Let me just elaborate on point one here a little bit. The reason why I say there needs to be more information in one places is simple, it's incredibly difficult to find anything right now. Let's say I'm new, I've played at Delta Force a few times and want to play more, so somebody there tells me to do walkons. So, I get home, go on google and search for "Bristol paintball walkon", what do I find?
First result is for the Skirmish Bristol site, to a page which lists all of their walkon dates for the year, which is great. However, then you read the first line on the page and see " Here is our 2013 walk-on events calendar for experienced paintball players." Oh, so as a new player I'm not welcome there, looks like I'm not going, and just like that the paintball community has lost a new player. The first thing they read makes it perfectly clear that they are not welcome and so that's it, I'm out of here.

To me it seems like the biggest problem is not the price, obviously it will put off plenty of people but there is very little we can do about it. The biggest problem is lack of information, sure this site is great if you're already involved in the community, but to an outsider it all seems pretty impenetrable.

Now, after I've procrastinated from doing an essay for Uni that's due in 10 hours by writing an essay on here, I really should get back to my essay!

Some great points there:-

Point1, I agree that one central information point for all paintball would be fantastic, if you could find someone to co-ordinate all the input from the different teams and sites and keep it up to date, then why not, maybe some unbiased facebook page?

Point2 Again would work, but only sites who could gain from people coming for walkons would push this, why would a punter only paintball operation send its customers away to go spend cash else where.

Point3, Lending kit to strangers is ok till it all goes wrong and something goes missing or seriously broken. I lend kit to friends all the time, but they know if its lost or trashed it comes out of their pocket, might be hard to get a stranger to stump up a load of cash if it all goes pear shaped.

Point4, There are always differing points of view what equipment is best and how much should I spend, but if the person comes along to a walkon, either woods or supair, there are lots of people there who would let a player try a marker on the range or in a game.

Point5 I don't play sup air, but many years ago I did attend a supair training day, where we were all relative newbies to supair style play, which was great fun and didn't cost the earth, there must be cheap events like this going on round the UK. Tournaments may not be the best place for a newbie to play and £100 is a lot of cash to splash out and spend a lot of time being shot out first.

Point6 Not the best wording for a site that wants walkon players to come and play at. I was very lucky when I started paintball, PE in Manchester was only up the road so I drove over there, asked lots of questions and came along to the site they used to operate for my first walkon.

Point7, Get that essay finished or you will end up doing extra study over a weekend when you wanted to go paintballing.

Just another quick thought, if the UKPSF hosted a website with all the team info, player contacts and site details etc, but access to the information was only available to full members might this not boost their membership as well?

This topic has always been of interest to me. Im always trying to get more people in to paintball. It really is such an awesome activity hiding in plain sight

Having your own kit is definitely the hook in paintball. It is the great enabler. Rental kit really does hold you back even at a beginner level of play. Give a new guy a good mask and marker after they’ve suffered the rental kit for a game or two and nine times out of ten they are gunna love it and want to take it up as a full time hobby.

But that’s one way to get people to want to get in to paintball. Helping them get up and running is much more difficult.

As has been pointed out in this discussion, there are loads of barriers to becoming a baller: money, kit, knowledge of good events and venues and finding people to play with.

Money will always be a problem with bringing people in to paintball. But that’s just tough. If you’ve got no money, paintball is just not for you. End of. Money is not a problem for everyone though. Plenty of people out there are in work and CAN afford to play paintball.

Kit is a huge barrier when starting out. As it’s been pointed out if you ask “what kit should I get?” in a public place you can expect to be slapped in the face with a shed load of over-information and more opinions than atoms in the universe.

Knowledge of events and venues is another big problem for starters. I was fortunate enough to accidently attend a walk-on the first time I ever played paintball and it really was an eye opener. Anyone I had ever talked to about paintball had said how it costs £10 for 100 paintballs, and there I was blasting through 2000 for £60 (and over time cases have seemed to get cheaper and cheaper!). I found the guys at the site pretty helpful and they took me under their wing. Not everyone is that lucky @southernP8nt describes how it is for new guys looking for a place to play perfectly.

Finding people to play with may be yet another problem, but I also firmly believe it is the solution. If a newbie can find an experienced player who will take him/her to events, show them the ropes, and essentially steer the newbie towards their educated opinion of what kit to get, then its problem solved.

To make the sport grow, all it would take is for every player to take a friend a walk-on (preferably somebody with a job!). Let them use your marker. Trust them to treat your kit with respect. If you don’t have a spare gat, play with a rental for half the day and give them a taste of a proper paintball marker

If they get the bug, take time to bring them in to the game more. You might want to rinse-repeat with the walk-on a few times. If you play tourney, lend them kit and take them a practice day when they get confident. Eventually they are gunna want to get their own kit. When they do, they should hopefully trust you enough to take your advice rather than having to resort to the internet.

It is simple really, we could near double the amount of active players if everyone took the time to get a mate in to paintball.

Keeping players in the game long-term is a far bigger challenge. Money is the biggest killer. I am a repeat sufferer of losing people to money as most people I’ve introduced to the game are students If anyone knows a secret to keep people in id love to hear it xD

Nice Post Jack.

Setting up a simple website that contained all the necessary information would take virtually no time, it could be done in a day if you knew what you were doing, web hosting for it would cost bugger all and once it was set up then it wouldn't require much time at all to maintain. Kit would need updating every couple of months to reflect changing prices, the walkon and tournament dates & info would probably need checking every month or so, hardly a lot of maintenance.

In terms of establishing a website that had all of the information that a newbie needs in one place wouldn't take very much time or money at all.

I'm not saying that new players should be told exactly what to do, I'm saying that all of the information should be available in a very clear format on a single site.

So the site would contain a description of what speedball is, of what woodsball is, a few videos of each, a list of good sites around the country for both, walkon dates, team contacts, and recommended kit for a variety of budgets (not telling people exactly what to buy, but recommending a few options for each price range).

It would still allow new players to make their own decisions, but it would provide them with the sort of information that they need in order to make a decision without it being difficult.