Pro Talk Episode 2: Pro Paintball Tips and we answer your Submitted Questions!

Hey, guys. John here with Pro Edge Paintball and professional paintball team AC Dallas.

This is Matt, Fuzzy Jackson.
Fuzzy Jackson, my little brother here, also plays for Pro Edge Paintball team AC Dallas. Team AC Dallas. Ac Dallas. His car got a little crazy in front of us.
Sorry. We're doing the whole carpool, karaoke, risk and drive and stuff like that.

All right. So, if you guys don't know a little bit about us, we're doing a... We just started a little video YouTube channel-ish, what do you want to call it? Station Monday afternoon Pro talk to Jackson Brothers. Sorry, man. And so what we're trying to do is trying to bring you some good quality videos to help the newer players get into and learn more about competitive paintball. I've been posting a little bit on my social media, asking for people to reach out and send us questions. Today, we've got three more questions to answer, and they're general paintball questions about us and how we got started. If you haven't watched one of our videos before, thank you for watching. A little bit about us. We've been playing paintball for about 20 years now. We have been playing professional paintball for about five years now. We've played on Team VCK, and we've been with AC Dallas out of Dallas, Texas for the last four or five years. We've been, like I said, we started playing paintball in 1998 when we were super young and now we're playing and we have traveled all over the place there.
We've been to France, probably the coolest place to play in France and London. I had an opportunity to play there and we travel the world and this is what we do all the time. Enough about us. Before we get started on the questions, one thing we say every video is make sure if you guys have any questions about getting into tournament paintball, getting into paintball in general, let's say you've never played before and you're curious and you found our channel, go ahead and comment below. Comment below. Send us a message. Any paintball general questions, we'll make sure that way we put them into our next videos.
If you're not a newer player and you're looking for more of an advanced question, like tournament-type stuff, comment below as well. I say this, we're going to get there. This is the early episodes, the early stages of this. We're getting going in a sense. I think.

A little background information on that.

Background information, starting it, and then we're going to progress and go from there. Then we'll get into just I say we literally just joke in Q&A's and jump all over the place just with specific questions.
Last week, if you're curious, last week's questions were, How do we get into paintball? And what style do we grow up playing and how do we afford to play? So, if you want to look on our channel for last week's video, maybe I'll put a link below. And that way you can check it out and then you get to learn a little more about us and check it out. So, cool deal.

Let's get started. This week's video, our first question is going to be, Do you recommend working at a paintball field? What are the benefits? These are questions that some people have actually messaged me. Do you recommend working at a paintball field and what are the benefits to it?
We talked about this a little bit in the first video. It is exactly what actually John and I did to really get into it and be able to afford it when we were young. Short answer, absolutely, I would recommend it because sometimes say you're 16, it's tough to get certain jobs, certain places. For me personally, it doesn't exactly sound exciting to go work at McDonald's or Table Bell or bagging groceries, something like that.
How about paintball field?
A paintball field is a little bit more cool, I think. A little bit more enjoyable, I would say, if you're into paintball. You're around paintball people. You're around people that are playing paintball. Around people that are learning about paintball. All of it just is way more fun. And the benefit side of it can go pretty far, realistically.
I mean, the best thing is a discount. If you get employed discounts pretty much no matter where you work, if you've had jobs before. And so if you're trying to afford to play paintball and your parents are like, oh, this is really expensive, go check out your local field. There's some things that I'm going to go into later on this, but one of the biggest things is you get the discounts out and you learn get to meet the community. You get to meet other players. If you're an only child, not every day people just walk in your life that also do the same thing you do. So, get out, meet great, you stay active, you're walking around the paintball field and maybe it turns into more down the road.

You might find some guys that are also in similar situations like some other kids.  If you're a kid, you're a guy, you're a little bit older, whatever it may be, you might find some other people that are in similar situations trying to get into the sport, trying to get into the competition-

Or just- -

Or just play paintball. You don't necessarily have to be a competitive player to be someone that works on a field. You can just enjoy playing paintball. And the pay with the job, of course, and then the discounts that you're going to get and then the community like John is talking about it can be something that is extremely awesome just in your life as a whole. I know there's a lot of people in Houston that it's a local field. They do a bunch of scenarios and things like that. A lot of the guys now used to play competitions, but they don't need more. But it's like a side gig that they do on the weekends that work Saturday and work a Saturday here and there, get some discounts, and they'll play a scenario with all the employees. So, it's like a big group of friends that also work together.

One thing we started in Houston a couple of years ago is called the Houston paintball club. And the whole premise. The whole idea was at my store we have customers come in. I was like, hey, man, I just moved to town. I don't know anybody to play. We're like, oh, cool. Good luck. We're going to send them on their way. Next week another guy comes and you're like, Oh, man, I should have hooked them up. So, we started a Houston paintball club. It's a Facebook page or if you're in Houston or in Texas and you're interested in playing in Houston, it's super cool because people... It's natural. We didn't mean it this way, but the idea was to bring local players together. So, we used to run events that we we scheduled, we brought them together. I was like, look, you got a girlfriend that wants to play for the first time. We controlled the environment. It was a safe environment. Make sure people weren't going to get just blown off the field. The tournament guys noted new to turn it down and it really was to bring the community together. When you go look at work at your local field, it's the same thing. You meet a group of people and now you have more multiple people. Everybody knows that you're not going to go play by yourself usually. So, you get this opportunity to meet other people, at least in the local area, probably live close to you, and you can go play. I'm going to go into the next question and then we're going to touch back on the benefits of working on a paywall field. Question number two, how do we get into tournament play? Also, how do we get into tournament play and how do you get into tournament play? I guess we can do that. I'll let First start off. How do we get into tournaments and whatnot?
The field that I worked at at the time used to do these little local three-mans. By working there, by just being there, basically, I happened to just stumble on to one. I worked the same day that day when it happened, or I was going to work the same day when it happened, and we found out about it. John and I talked about it and we said, Well, we should actually try to watch this and see what this thing is about. I ended up not taking the day off or just not working whatever it was to go watch this tournament. And we discovered basically this idea of paintball by just being there and watching it, and it made us have this desire to do it. And by that, I think John actually put an ad in to-

Oh, yeah. We always played competitive sports too. In high school, I think you ran track, played football. I played football, played soccer.
Every sport I possibly could. I played football.
And did a little bit of track and stuff like that. So, we're already competitive. And so it was a three man tournament series just to give you a heads up. And so we were like, man, we got into the super sweet. And so there used to be a magazine out called Action Pursue Games APG. And so we put a little ad in there. I put an ad in there. It was looking for other players.
Looking for third.
Looking for third paintball player must shoot a spider like we do. We got some really weird adult phone calls back then and it's terrified me. I didn't know better now we didn't have the internet and I still had landlines and cords on the phone and stuff at home with no cell phones. Anyways, we found one of our best buddies that we still know today. Freaking, what's that? -happened to 20 years later?

Oh, yeah, 20 years. It's two years.
It's two years after mine, which is two days after mine.

It was just crazy.

20 years, still friends with him. He still plays occasionally. He happened to live like 45 minutes or so away from us. We met him at a paintball field, played probably just some random day. I don't remember when we picked up. He had a sick gun, though. He wasn't a pro-price guy. He had a really nice gun. He had a really nice gun. We also picked up some other cat. I don't remember when it was. Brian was the first.
So, Brian White, his name. I got to give him credit there. Literally, still a good buddy of ours. Brian White, first one he came out, played paintball. We got along with him. It was awesome. And then I don't know who you're talking about Kyle?
Yeah, Kyle Tate. I actually- I think we're

Still friends with him on Facebook.
I ran into him through a different group of friends completely. It's actually really funny. Kyle Tate, we somehow got introduced to and then we had four people. John and I, Brian, and this guy named Kyle, and I think we probably played a little bit as a group in a three-on-three setting, right. We play the same format that the competition was supposed to be in because we wanted to try and play one of these competitions. We did that probably, I'd say, a handful of times or something like that. Then one of the tournaments was going to come back around. I don't remember how we paid for it or whatever. I don't remember any of this. But somehow we scrounge up enough money and we registered to play this competition and basically just jumped into it head first. Other than watching the one competition didn't have a clue really what we were getting ourselves into.

We had probably been playing paintball in general for probably about I think it was two or three years. I think that was like-

Two years?

I was 15-ish I think we played the first one. 2000, I think is when it was. So, yeah, we just played our first tournament and I think we got second to last.
I didn't even play the first. I think we had eight Dueling games.

Oh, Kyle shot an angel.
Yeah, Kyle shot an angel. Sick gun, by the way. So, Brian and Kyle had very nice guns at the time. John and I not so much.

They were our winger.
I didn't even play. First game with the competition that I think we watched, I think I was only 12 or 13. I was pretty young. I watched it and everyone was shooting so fast and I was terrified. I'm not even kidding. No, just write that.
Not even kidding. Fuzzy, Matt, Fuzzy Jackson, Golden Barrel winner, NXL, kill count leader of whatever. Look, he's even wearing a shirt. We promised you we didn't plan this. This is this top gun award winner shirt. He said he was scared to play paintball.
100%- Don't feel bad. -terrified to get on the same field with these guys shooting so fast with these fancy guns and all this stuff. I think I sat on the first five games out of eight or something like that. And this Kyle guy that we thought was going to be awesome because he had all this awesome equipment. This is a segue. I've talked to him about this. He's fine. It was awful. It was just awful.

You've talked to him about this?
Yeah, I've talked to him about this. I'm watching him play and I don't remember. I think you guys lost all five games. I think you guys lost all five games. John at one point looks to me. He's like, Man, do you really just not want to play? I'm scared, blah, blah, blah. At some point, I literally just said, Sure, let's just do it. Let me just jump in and play. And then jumped in and literally played a game. I don't remember if we won or not, even if I shot a person or anything like that, but played the last three competitive games at that tournament, we might have won one. I don't know.

I don't think we got third to last or something like that.

And when I played it, got hooked instantly with the competition side of it. Different from playing in the woods. But ultimately, to answer the question, how did we get into it?

Part one of the question is how do we get into it? Part two, how do you get in to turn up a paintball? I'll give you a quick answer.

Just jump in. That's my way of saying it. It goes back to the …

First question about being part of the community. You end up being learning with people, you realistically, you have to just meet and greet. You can't rush it. You can't just go into it. Everybody knows if you've ever tried doing anything fun with a group of people, you got to have a group of people. You got to know them. So, how do you get to turn up to paintball? Check out your local Facebook pages. Most regions throughout the country, for example, we have Houston Texas paintball series. We have Houston paintball club. For sure, I know for certain, multiple teams have been formed because of the Houston paintball club. People that want to go play recreationally together and wanted to try something different. You're like, hey, I can see you every weekend go to a paintball field. What's up? And John, let's go play paintball. And you get into it and you get started. So, if your local area doesn't have that, maybe you're the guy, you're the girl to start it. You know what I mean? Just go ahead and create that page. If you can't find other local players to play, what we did, honestly, we started our own team to answer your question, how we get we started our own team. We say, hey, we got two. We only need one more technique to go play. And we've always that's the way we did it. I think we tried out for one team first.

That was way later, though.
No, right when we started, we tried for one team and decided we're going to start our own because we're going to go play with some local paintball players. And we're like, no. Anyway… So, I'm saying start your own Facebook page if you don't know, if there's nobody in your group or in your area playing at the time. If there's a paintball field nearby, that means people are looking to play paintball. And if not, then you've got to be maybe that ambassador and that positive grow model and just bring people together on that one and realistically go back to our first question of, should you work in a paintball field?  The answer is yes. If you enjoy it, you love it like we did when we first started and we still do, get out there. The only way you're and it's going to be awkward. I know a lot of you guys are just on the Internet liking girls, Instagram pictures and stuff or whatever, or TikTok. You're going to have to talk to people face to face and get to know them. Just say hi. Just say, hey, what's up? You see them all the time? Introduce yourself. Paintball communities across the world are extremely friendly.

You already have something in common with them if you're at the paintball field, right. You're already somewhat similar in the sense of you have this mutual agreement that you both enjoy paintball. So, you have a common ground right there. Most of the time, people in paintball are very friendly, like John's saying. And you use the resources around you like John's saying. The paintball field and Facebook, Instagram, everything nowadays is so much more connected now, right. We didn't have any of that. We were forced to go to the field and talk to people and find people or use this magazine to put an ad in to try to find players because forums didn't exist at the time. Facebook didn't exist at the time. Use the resource that you have. And I say this too right now John and I are driving home from practice right now and it's a three-hour drive. Don't get me wrong. We're at a different level of competitiveness than what we're talking about just starting out. But, say you have two fields that are both within an hour of you, one's 20 minutes.

That's a good point.

One's 50 minutes.

I like that.
If the 50 minute one has competitions and that's what you want to do, maybe you have to try to convince your parents, Hey, mom.

Maybe even once a month. Once every couple of months.

Go check it out. This field is just better for all of these reasons. This 20 minute drive field is only going to be for fun in the woods or whatever it may be. But, you may have to take that extra leap and sacrifice a little bit more time to get there. Like John said, maybe not be able to go as often because your parents don't want to drive you if you're young. And so this goes back to our third question.
I think you did this on purpose.

I had the accident, but it worked.
The question was how to convince your parents. We'll do two answers on this one, two questions. How to convince your parents to work at a paintball field and how to convince your parents to let you play competitive tournament paintball. And just a brief thing on the paintball. I think people are mainly worried about the tournament side, how to get a tournament. I'll do the paintball field one first. My favorite thing about working in a paintball field is on the weekends. Your parents don't want you to work during the week, work late. They want you to home by 9:00, eat dinner, study, do your stuff.

Focus on your school, get an education. Be smart.
All that good stuff. But, work on Saturdays. Maybe work on Sundays if you don't go to Church. But, if you do, you can work on Saturdays. Still have a little bit income. Still get the discounts to the local field, still meet your community. Plenty of sleep on Sunday. It teaches you the responsibility. You get the discounts and you get paid and it doesn't interfere with your normal life of school and education and maybe school sports-

Family time or whatever it may be.

And paintball fields are they are usually only twice a week. So, they're pretty open. They understand that you have to work part time and stuff and it's very friendly and it's not dangerous. It's outdoors, which I know all the parents want to -

Get your kids off video games.
Get your kids off video games, want to get you outside, all that stuff. So it's a good workout. It's great. It really is. You've already learned all the responsibilities. And realistically, I'm not going to say it's not hard because it's hot.
Are we in Texas? It's hot in Texas.
It could be cold with it. You know what I mean? I'm just saying it's miserable, but it teaches you all of that. And it's not a terrible job by any means. You get to watch people play paintball and if you're just not a cold hearted person, it's cool to see other people have a good time. And if you get to be that person to help meet them and help that birthday party kid play for his first time because you remember how excited you are. Anyways, all of this to convince your parents, there's so many benefits. The main one, though, is it's on the weekends, it's out of the way, good opportunity, good scheduling. And so over to the discount. So, over to the how to convince your parents to play tournaments. It teaches you.

There's so many life lessons that we've learned, I've learned, and I feel like other paintball people that have played for any amount of years can attest to winning and losing in general is something that paintball competitions just force upon you. You're not going to win every game. Every time you get shot, technically, it's a little loss, and it's adding a little character to you because you get to learn how you handle it. I say this, I watch a lot of sports I always talk about this, I use a lot of analogies. It's very similar to other sports in the sense of it teaches you all of these responsibilities, a lot of all of these-

Character building.

-Character building things that all these are going to teach you. It's just a different sport in a sense. It's not some crazy different thing. The easiest way that I look at it is it's just another sport. Unfortunately, no, it's not NFL. It's not NHL, right. But it's very similar in what it's going to teach you as a person and the experience that you're going to learn, the community that you're going to be a part of. I don't really know of very… I say this very few stories I've ever heard of a bad paintball communities anywhere across the world.

To try to go back to the question, how to convince your parents, you meet more people, you're outdoors, it's teaching you, it's building your character, you get to be active. You're making friends on that and they go, Okay, well, hey, it's really expensive. Okay, well, I work at the local paintball field. I raise my money on it. I'll do fundraisers, I wash the dishes, I'll do chores. I know a lot of people out there these days seem to be very open about being anti-my gun. And I respect your opinion on all of that. Very rarely and I shouldn't say this out loud, very rarely has a paintball gun ever physically harmed somebody unless it was intended to or is a complete absolute, disastrous accident.

The joke used to be many, many years ago, we used to talk about it through the sport is that it was one of the safest sports ever.

It still statistically is apparently.
Yes, somewhere someone did some type of comparison that it was safer than walking down a golf course and getting hit with a golf ball. Because the biggest injury in paintball is going to be an ankle injury or a knee injury which happens because you slide.
Which happens literally anywhere.

Yeah. It's safe-wise. And if you compare a... We all grew up being... We're in Texas, so we grew up playing football, right.

Texas football.

Texas football is just insane here, right. If you're not giving it your all, you're not even playing, right. Playing football in Texas compared to playing paintball, our mom was like, Yep, I'm down. Let's do it. 100%. I went to the hospital once because I had this chest spasm while I was playing football. John fractured his vertebrae playing football and could have been paralyzed from the waist down, right. I can't say it's never going to happen in paintball, but if that happened in paintball, pretty sure you'd be the first.

Yeah. So, it's safe. All of these good things. Like I said, the community, our community in Texas has been great. Hopefully, your community in your area again, I've never really had anybody. So, if your parents and you're watching it out there and you're watching this, thank you for watching and letting your kids at least get into paintball. But give them a chance. Straight up. Give them a chance to go meet the community. Go sit out there. There'll be some characters that you're not going to approve of, but that's going to be literally in the grocery store when you go buy groceries tomorrow. So, I'm just saying let them have a chance. Go play, meet some new people. My mother used to go take a book to the paintball field. Now, you'll have Wi-Fi and stuff. We didn't have. Mom would go read a book back in the day and hang out and make sure we didn't get in trouble. And people were super friendly. There are birthday parties there having a good time. I'd say how bad could it be, but how bad could it be? How bad could it be. So, to convince your parents, let them watch this video, the second half of this video.

And just make sure they know that like, hey, you just want to try it. You're going to be safe. Of course, you have to be responsible. You have to show them that you can be responsible with owning a paintball gun, owning the equipment. You're not shooting in the house. You're not doing all the stupid stuff that people are doing. You're not driving down the road with your boys and shooting street signs. Call out to all you people that do that.

Plenty of movies display paintball in this negative ways. And most I would say the competitive community generally does not do any of that. There are going to be your people. I will put this in your mouth. Which is always going to be. If you're that.
Person that's out there shooting street signs, you make us all look bad. Create a bad name for us. I know you think it's funny, and it's real hard not to tell friends of ours that have told us, Oh, man, I shot up this car dealership.

Brand new cars.
Come on, man. Like we're just, literally, asking for somebody to say, You can't do paintball stuff anymore. I'm just saying, be responsible, save your own be responsible, follow through. Show them that it's outdoors, show them you can enjoy it and show them some videos. Don't show them nothing against the HK Army, but don't show them all.

The cussing videos. The old HK videos.

The old HK..

We're trying to keep these videos about 15, 20 minutes. That way it doesn't go on for too long. But, before we head out, of course, thank you so much for watching. We're on our way slowly to get dark here. We're on our way home from Dallas for one of our practices. And if you have any questions again, no matter how big, how small, comment below. You got any feedback for us? If it's negative, don't want to hear it. I'm not trying not to be a negative person. If it's positive, thank you so much for taking the time and watching our videos. Please like our video. Also, we're going to release a new video. The game plan is every Monday, I think at two o'clock. Please subscribe to the channel below. It really means a lot by liking our video, it means a lot, helps other players find these videos, and hopefully we can help somebody's parents.

Somewhere.

Somewhere. Help them get into paintball and go play and join up with the other guy that's watching this video, a girl that's watching this video to go start their own paintball team and be the next famous pro paintball team in 10 years or whatever the case is.
Comment below. If you do not feel comfortable commenting below, I understand you might be embarrassed on your question, send me a message on Instagram @JohnJackson_22. I think it's under score 22, or to the Pro Edge Paintball Instagram @proedgepaintball. That's all it is at Pro Edge Paintball on those bases. I will make sure we add a to our video and not call you out or anything like that. Other than that, thank you so much for watching. Don't be too harsh. We're new getting into this. We appreciate it.

This is episode two, okay, guys.

This is episode two. We're working our way. Like I said, if you're a more experienced player and this is for you, stay tuned. Go and subscribe. We're going to get into the tournament side, into our pro-level type stuff, and we'll bring even more content on that one. Otherwise, thank you guys so much. Have a great week. We'll see you guys next week.