If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the road to success is paved with planning, marketing and hard work. Saturday, July 28th saw the kick off (punt?) of X-treme Tactical Paintball and Carolina Panther’s DeAngelo Williams’ “Army of Ten“, a ten-man team woodsball tournament at the Waxhaw, NC field. The tournament had every INTENTION of being a phenomenal event for scenario paintball. Blend a world class athlete and NFL football star who loves to play paintball, mix in $5,000 out of his own pocket as prize money, toss in a naturally, wooded scenario paintball field, throw in a dash of testosterone and competition and you should have a helluva tournament, right?       Right?  Is this microphone on?  (Where does that road lead again?)

The idea seemed simple. Take 32 scenario paintball teams and have them compete against each other for points in a structured tournament. They would play three 30 minute mini-scenarios against each other. At the end of the competition, the two teams with the most points would play against each other one last time for the $5,000 and additional prizes. The winner then plays an “All-Star team of DeAngelo Williams and some of his celebrity buddies.” I think for legal reasons they can’t say it’s mostly Carolina Panthers, but I’ve played against these guys and let’s just say that they are very at-home running down a field in protective gear.

Built it, but who came?

 Any experienced marketing person will tell you that Kevin Costner was full of crap. Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come. You need to market it, generate buzz and then market it some more. Unfortunately, this is an area that many paintball fields haven’t mastered yet. X-treme Tactical seems to just the latest field to have built it and waited for players to show up. They are still waiting.

Instead of the anticipated 32 teams registering for the $5000 prize, only 5 teams showed up for the opening day of the tournament. A sixth team no-showed. The teams that did attend were Rogue Cell, TAT (Tactical Assault Team), TrainWreck, (new teams assembled just for the event) and X-treme’s own 7th Reapers. When asked how many teams signed up for the event, Dan and Jane, the owners of the field, both non-committally mentioned they weren’t sure, but players stated that they believed it was only the six teams that were scheduled to show up on the 28th. Even DeAngelo Williams, who the posters state as “hosting” the event, was rumored to be in Cabo today. I guess he had better things to do.

How Did the Road Turn South?

 A big money scenario tournament with a celebrity sponsor? How could this NOT attract teams by the scores? The best we can do is make some educated guesses to help other producers and fields avoid some costly mistakes.

Lack of “Pull” marketing - X-treme Tactical put up a separate website for the Army of Ten event, but putting up a site is not enough. People need to be able to find it in the search engines or the site needs to have traffic driven to it. As I look at the page now (end of June), it has had 1041 visits. If you subtract out the amount of times the owners went to the site alone that is not nearly enough traffic to pull 32 teams. Posters at local paintball stores (besides X-treme’s) would have helped. Sponsored ads on Google would have drawn a ton of traffic.

Push Marketing - In marketing, there are two kinds of advertising, push and pull. Pull marketing is a web site that’s out there and the customer looks FOR it. Push marketing is where you actively reach out to the customer. Postcards are another example of Push marketing. X-treme did send out an email announcement to all of their customers, five days before the sign-up deadline. They should have reached out dozens of times starting 60-90 days out and every other week until the deadline. Get people talking about it. Five days before the sign-up deadlines, teams have already scheduled what they intend to do for the next few months.

 Time of the year - It’s North Carolina and it’s the end of June. The temperatures are ALWAYS going to be close to 100 degrees. It’s been that way for several million years. Did someone think that was going to change? When I asked the owners about that in the planning stages of the event back in April, the answer was simple. “DeAngelo plays football in the fall and winter.” Regardless of DeAngelo’s schedule, it is still a tad warm in the Carolinas in the summer time and fields all over the south are suffering from poor attendance because people play less when it is that hot. DeAngelo may be the sponsor, but you are supposed to market to the customers needs, not the sponsors real job. Put your line in the water when the fish are biting, not when it’s convenient to fish.

Lack of Positive Buzz - X-treme Tactical had posted some announcements on some paintball forums, such as SpecOpsPaintball.com, Command Decisions Wargames Center and PBnation.com, but a simple post is not enough. Conversations need to be inspired and directed to be positive. For example, some of the posts worried that the tournament would lean in favor of X-Treme’s home team. A legitimate concern since these guys in one form or another have been playing this field for months. Bias toward the home team was also an issue mentioned at various other fields we visited. Other concerns were the scoring systems and scheduling of the tournament. The 7th Reapers themselves could have stymied this, if for no other reason than to protect their reputation, should they win. (Coincidentally, 7th Reapers are now in first place for this event.) Other than the concerns over the rules and the home team advantage, there was next to no buzz at all on the forums. I would have pushed and pushed about the $5000 prize money. Paintball is an expensive sport and teams ALWAYS need money for events, equipment, whatever. Sell the sizzle. Sell the chance to play against an NFLer and his buddies. Sell the opportunity to brag about being the best team in the Carolinas. If there is one thing paintballers have, it’s ego. Don’t just fire and forget it.

 Competition for paintball dollars - The event could not have been at a worse time of the year. Oklahoma D-Day, the biggest paintball event in the world, was just wrapping up. Skirmish in Pennsylvania is right in the middle of the Army of Ten schedule. Operation Burning Sky a 26 hour scenario at Boss Paintball was scheduled months ahead of time for the week before. (Burning Sky ended up being canceled for some of the very same reasons listed here.) Registration is open for Valor vs. Venom (G.I. Joe vs. Cobra) is scheduled for August 16th at Black River Paintball and Vietnam Patrol: Heat is scheduled for July 19th at Wolf Creek Paintball. Army of Ten spanned three major events and was within a few weeks of two more. Command Decisions Wargame Center opens registration for it’s huge Fulda Gap two day event this week and (now it’s third day) Platoon Leader Mil-Sim Invitational to kick it off. Those two events are not till fall, but with a cap on registration, players are already signing up. (The Mil-Sim event, originally scheduled for August, was moved to November due to hot weather and gas prices.) Team: Tango Alpha opted out of Army of Ten because financially and time-wise we were just over-commited. (As it turns out, we are the general/command team of Vietnam Heat the same day of Army of Ten’s finale.) There are only so many dollars and days each player can be expected to shell out in a given time period. To make matters worse, with these high gas prices , out of state teams making road trips are scarcer than Hillary’s chances of election. Again in the early planning stages when asked about moving the event to a less busy time of year… “DeAngelo plays football in the fall and winter.”

Too many consecutive weekends - This was the same answer when asked about the continuous schedule. Many teams weren’t able to attend due to the fact that the tournament was advertised as running June 28-29 th, July 12 th-13th, 18th and 19th, missing only the Fourth of July weekend. Six out of 8 weekend days in a row! I don’t know about your wife, but my $500 portion of the prize money would cost me half of everything I own. This is a serious commitment away from family in the summer and overlapping numerous events. Not many players, let alone entire teams, can commit to keeping this amount of time open. Life gets in the way of paintball again. Now, as it turns out, they may not have to be there every weekend, but no one knew that for 2 months in advance. If this is to determine the best team of 2008, why not schedule it over a six months (See DeAngelo’s Palm Pilot) or better yet, as a single 3 day event so out-of-state teams could attend? As it turns out, due to lack of team participation, the event will only run the first weekend and the last. Not really necessary to have all that many eliminations for 5 teams.

Army of Some

 The event received a bit of early promotion when ESPN.com mentioned it in an article about DeAngelo playing paintball in the off season. This lead the owners to believe that event would be videoed by ESPN and national corporate sponsorships were forthcoming. The problem was that was where their buzz ended. The one ESPN article was the beginning and end of their momentum. Sponsors and ESPN may still be on their way as this is only the first day of six, but other than a few banners, no major sponsors were present on day one and no video van showed up to tape 50 players.

X-treme Tactical still seemed happy with the event. Even after building new bunkers, 1200 yards of new trenches, and a new parking lot, the Waxhaw field still made money. The prize money was put by sponsors, so their only outlay was the cost of the paint they sold.  For them it was a win-win. Although, there have been rumors that they are now considering charging additionally for parking for the last day of the tournament.

For the players, it was more mixed. Fewer players meant a better chance for the prize money, but it also meant that their bragging rights as the best team in the Carolinas really means “the best team in the Carolinas… of these five teams“. The players seemed focused on their game and enjoying themselves when they finally got to play. Rogue Cell (not to be confused with “Rouge Cell”) was scheduled to play Team Fury in the morning, but because they no-showed, Rogue Cell won by default. They weren’t scheduled to play again until 4:30 P.M. (on an excrutiatingly hot, sunny 98 degree day) against Team TrainWreck. TrainWreck left after their successful morning session and were hopefully coming back. I know Werewolf and his team, and I would bet good money that Rogue Cell, as aggressive and sure of their abilities as they are, would have MUCH rather played Fury than take the forfeit, even though they scored the maximum number of points anyway. They didn’t come to SIT in the heat, they came to “BRING IT.” They may have their hands full in the afternoon session. TrainWreck (reputedly) included a retired military (Navy Seal?) who “knifed” (barrel tagged) two players in one game, flanked two more from behind and “knife-killed” two more in the next and tried to surrender three. They drew on him and he capped all three before they could draw a bead on him. Six other members of his team were walk-ons.

How the month long two weekend tournament will play out is anyone’s guess. Each of the five teams playing today are mentally figuring out what new gear $5000 will buy. I believe that X-treme Tactical (and other fields) learned some important lessons for their next venture. While most of the players seemed to be enjoying the competition, it’s a shame that the lack of participation will diminish their bragging rights. How cool would it be to say you are the “Best team in the Carolinas”? Hopefully there will be a similar tournament in the future that not only follows the path of good intentions but the road to success. Or at least a wooded trail to it.

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Paul “Wingman” Metheney has 25 years of web, management and marketing experience, is the editor of the Southeast’s scenario news blog, TangoAlpha2.com and captain of the blog’s sponsored team, Team:Tango Alpha (http://TeamTangoAlpha.com).