A history lesson about the D (divisional) List- part 2

Television. (This is a subject for a later post in greater detail)
World Cup (in the woods playing 10 man) was on ESPN. Yeah, ESPN, cable television to the masses. It was in Kissimmee, Florida, the first Paintball World, no more than 10 minutes from where the current World Cup takes place. Television changed everything. Arguably it was the reason we came out of the woods. We had a taste of the pie in the sky and we wanted more.

Then in the last 9 years, it seems to be the greatest leap we, as a sport, have made in the marathon to a mainstream sport. Paintball was unregulated, and the 2000's brought on paintball associations, and the e dawn of the tournament series. Back then. there was 1 league, and 2 divisions in paintball. Pro and amateur. In your area there were few teams, and if you were lucky you got to practice, or get slaughtered by, a pro team as practice. And slowly, camouflage turned to bright motorcross style jerseys. Woods turned first to dirt mounds, (little known fact) then to Hyperball tubes (the black, plastic, corrugated construction tubing) and then finally to the Angel Airball fields (yup Angel, WDP, now Angel Paintball Sports). The first electronic paintball markers were invented, and the big manufactures got their fame during this time. The E-blade for the Autococker (where Eclipse got their start), the Angel markers, RT Automags, Peuno-Ventures (the company that originally made the shoebox Shocker Sport), Smart Parts, ADG, Spyder, Tippmann, Bob Long and the Intimidator, the Diablo Matrix (soon to be the Dye Matrix) were the big companies. And there was no rate of fire cap, there were no referees (you checked yourself). Then the big leagues started.

Then the split. The NPPL and PSP become two different leagues. This was the beginning of the D-List. This was the beginning of classifications, where you didn't have to play pros at every tournament. This was the very beginning of X-ball. The cutting of team sizes, from 10 to 5 in PSP and the change from 10 to 7 for NPPL. The rate of fire evolved from however fast you could pump your gun, to however fast you could pull the trigger, to however fast your gun could cycle and how fast your hopper could feed, and then finally to a universal PSP ball per second cap of 15. The NPPL was always uncapped semi-automatic. (I rarely call shooting unlimited semi-automatic a skill, because now it is no longer a "skill" but a combination of trigger-bounce and mis-named "skill"). New technology was the catalyst for the new changes, as well as moving away from the woods, away from realistic, to branding the sport differently. No longer war-games, now actual sport, branding as a sport, not a hobby.