The Daily Campus

Issue date: 5/10/09 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Thomas Egan The paintball team has been oneo f the most successful clubs at UConn in recent memory. The Huskies went undefeated this year for their second straight Northeast Conference title.

Many students at UConn heard about the school's club paintball team when it became the center of controversy about funding from the Undergraduate Student Government. While the dispute brought a lot of attention to the team, UConn paintball's current president and field captain Antonio Costa believes that many people still don't quite understand what UConn paintball is all about.

"A lot of people don't even know anything about paintball or about our team," said Costa, a senior biomedical engineering and German double major. "Once they hear 'paintball' they all of a sudden think, 'Oh, these kids are out just in the woods. It's a waste of our money. Why are students paying for these students to go out and run around in the woods?' It's not like that at all."

Instead, this team makes its mark at the most competitive level in collegiate paintball, playing in tournaments hosted at established paintball facilities all across the Northeast and the rest of the country.

UConn's paintball team began competing in the National Collegiate Paintball Association, an organization comprising 440 different clubs, in 2003. Since then, the Huskies have elevated themselves to the upper echelon of collegiate paintball teams, winning the Class AA title in 2005 and back-to-back Class A titles in 2006 and 2007.

"It's extremely exciting, you know?" Costa, who has captained the team since his sophomore year, said. "You can consider yourself a national champion. As a team, we got really close together after that point because you've worked hard all season and in the end you have something to celebrate."

In Class A, the team plays a version of the game known as X-ball, which is a lot like five-on-five capture the flag - except this variant has large inflatable bunkers strewn all over the field and two teams shooting anywhere from 10 to 12 cases worth of paintballs, fired at a rate of 15 per second, with specialized guns known as markers. The paintballs, which come 2,000 to a case, can reach speeds upwards of 300 feet per second.

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