Thailand and other updates...

Finally going to update this...

Since the 3man the team has had a couple of changes. First, Diesel retired from competitive paintball (for now) so we've picked up Luke Martin. I really loved playing with Diesel, he was a perfect fit for our team and a great guy. He was always alive when it counted, and I always felt like he was putting in 100% to the team and he really believed in STK. Come back soon you scraggly manky creature. Luke (Zooey) has already settled in well with us. He's a strong pickup, he used to thrash us around a bit when he played for Menace Kids.

Next, the boys won the first round of the TK while I was away. The finals came down to a 1vs1 which Rambo won! Apparently Rambo was king of the tournament and was shooting 3+ people a game... and I believe it because Rambo is awesome!

After the TK, we all went to Pattaya in Thailand for a tournament. We didn't play paintball so good over there. We seemed to be doing OK, like we'd win the first 2 points outright, and then let the other team come back with 3 unanswered points. We did that EVERY game. It was incredibly frustrating. I think there were a couple of reasons for it. Firstly, we were definitely understaffed. We only had Brad in the pitts, but he was trying to coach as well. So we'd play the first two points, then be out of pods, so we'd frantically try to fill pods, air up, change the game plan all why dying in the billion degree heat. It was just too much and we threw so many games away. We did as well as we could given all of this, with Zooey power-chucking and Rambo looking like a giant red beetroot. Despite a disappointing performance, we still enjoyed the event! And we loved Thailand too... crazy place.

Following Thailand, Mason left the team. It's a huge loss, he was a great player. He could have left on good terms by just telling us he's out of money, or out of passion, or whatever, but instead he has just ignored all 400 of our calls to him? And we've found out through other people he's quit. It's a little bit hurtful how he has gone about it but we wish him the best...

In light of this, we've picked up Timmy Colgan and Travis Strurcke. They both played really well at WCA last year for Menace Kids, and we're already friends with them so it should be a good fit.

We're going to prepare for playing the Philippines event now.

Dash 3man Round 1 2010

Yesterday was the first round of Dash's 3man at Langley park. Dash had a really cool setup going on, and it was good for paintball to be in such a visible place.

It was a fun day, but the field was extremely challenging... it could definitely have used a few more playable bunkers -- I think it that would have made it more exciting for spectators too. Still enjoyed it though. Our 3man team consisted of me, Rambo and Stiffla.


We ended up finishing second.

Super 5's Round 5 and The Year 2009

On Sunday was the last round of the Super 5's, the final tournament for the year. We started off a little slow but managed to win the day, which also gave us the series.

With this result, STK's final standings for the year are:
- 1st TK Series
- 3rd Super 7's Series
- 1st Super 5's Series
- 4th World Cup Asia

I'm really pleased with these results. The team worked hard, and I don't think we could have had a better bunch of guys to get into all this with.

WCA 09 and Masters 09

Just had two weeks away for our big paintball adventure to Malaysia and then Sydney. Really had the best time with the guys.

World Cup Asia was pretty wild... we went through the prelims winning all our matches except one, and we drew another. This put us into the quarter finals against Operation Raskal. They didn't go down easy but we fought it out and won. This put us into the semifinals -- the winner would go on to play for 1st and 2nd. We came up against Hostile from Australia. We had been winning by being super aggressive, but Hostile contained us and we just couldn't get down the field. We lost the match, which left us to play off against DFT Eclipse from Dubai for 3rd and 4th. I think we dropped our heads a bit for this match -- needless to say we lost it, leaving us in 4th place.

I'm still really happy with how we went. We had to do a lot of hard work to make the top four.

And then the week after WCA, we went to Sydney to play the Masters. We had Glenn Takemoto from Infamous come guest on the team. He was a cool guy to have on the team and he played awesome.

Friday we had the State of Origin 10 man, which Stiffla, Griffin, Diesel and myself were a part of... it was super fun to play some 10 man, and we finished off coming 2nd to NSW.

The actual Masters field on Saturday and Sunday was pretty wild. It was a 7-man field using Race To bunkers...! It was great to play on. We came through the prelims sitting in 3rd seed.

Our first finals match was against Xtreme who had Marcello Margott, Alex Goldman and Greg Siewers on their roster. We stalemated the first game by using the full 7 minutes. We went on to win the next game, and lose the last, meaning that it would go down to 1 vs 1's. We sent out Glenn Takemoto to play against Marcello Margott. The game came down to the last 15 seconds, but eventually went in Xtreme's favour, leaving us to play off against Swat for 3rd and 4th.

We came out strong the first game and won. We lost the second. And the final game we stalemated. So again, it came down to 1 vs 1's. Swat sent out Mikko Huttenen from the Ironmen, so again we sent out Glenn. This might sound gay but I tried not to watch the game because I thought it would give Glenn bad luck... and then yeah, he won. So we took third.

That left us with 3rd in the series too. I'm happy with it.

In other news, I got player of the year.

Super 5's Round 4 09

Really fun day. The field setup was cool. Came 1st.

TK Tourney Round 4

Came 3rd. Despite being slightly disappointed at not being able to have a flawless run through the series, with us set to referee the last round we have secured the series win.

STK winners of the TK series 2009.

Woot.

Super 7's Round 2 09

This weekend we played the 2nd round of the Super 7's at Action Paintball WA. We decided for this round we'd play with just the 6 of us plus our American import so that we wouldn't have to worry about rotating. We flew over Scott Kemp from the Ironmen to play for us. He's a really awesome guy. It was a real honour to have him play on the team.

Our weekend went well. The preliminaries felt a little shakey although overall we finished them in 2nd place, losing to Extreme twice and then Hostile and ECR once each (all pro teams played each other twice).

First up in the finals we had to play against Hostile Intentions, last years series winners. First game we were able to slow them down getting into snake by going to the center 50, allowing Griffin to get in first. We picked off a few G's, and Scott mowed some people down the snake. We took the first game. Next game, we got held up and they beat us to the snake. I finally managed to get in and crawl down it, but blew it coming over the top and getting shot. Skempy and Mason still had the corners and they fought them off for a while but the paint kept bouncing and they eventually got shot. Last game we pretty much had a repeat of the first. We slowed them from the center 50, Griff had a game down the snake bunkering out their second carwash fill. Skemp got down the snake also and did more damage, leaving it in a 2 vs 1, Mason and Diesel to clean up. We won the game, allowing us to move on to play for first and second against Extreme.

The game against Extreme really emphasised the gap between the American pros and us... Extreme had Justin Rabackoff, Marcello Margott and Greg Siewers playing all on the same side of the field. They were switched on too... Their technical skills burnt us... I think Marcello shot 5 of us each game haha. Needless to say we couldn't come away with the win at this round, leaving us in second place.

Final results were:
1st - Extreme
2nd - STK
3rd - Menace
4th - Hostile