Todd Adamson Interview (1996)

Tournament paintball, it sort of gets into your blood doesn’t it. In Victoria the tourney scene is still in its infancy, so it was with great anticipation, that I travelled north to Sydney for the 1996 Masters to be held at Skirmish Adventures Helensburg. I would have to say that it was better than I had expected. Sure, it wasn’t as big a tournament as the Florida World Cup. But more importantly, it had the same feel the same level of excitement and player commitment.

It was also the second time that an American team had travelled all the way to Australia to compete (the first being the Green Machine at the Southern Cross Masters held in Newcastle in 1991). That team, Rage, had in its ranks a cross-section of top American paintball talent. With players from the All Americans and Aftershock to name a few. I was lucky enough to speak with Todd Adamson, captain of Rage, on the Sunday afternoon just before the presentation ceremony began.

Mike:
First of all, why did you decide to travel all the way to Australia to compete.

Todd:
Well, basically, I heard from some people in the industry that there was going to be a tournament, in early June, that was going to be really cool, in Australia. R P Scherer is one of my sponsors, I talked with them and they said, ‘Yes, we know about the tournament’ and I said I thought I’d like to go. We talked to Michael Wyebrew and Tim McCartney, I met them in San Diego, they were at the San Diego tournament. We met with them, we liked the guys, and we just decided to do it and it was really worth it. I mean this is a different style of paintball altogether.

Mike:
What would you say is different about it?

Todd:
Well.., it’s, it’s not so woodsy. The fields are much smaller, it’s a speedball type of game. The three fields that we’ve played on, the big slatted speedball field, the blisterball field, which is the smallest field I’ve ever seen in my life.., 10 on 10 and the village field, which was really cool. But then again it was all open, except on each wire, which was it’s own game in itself are the sort of fields that we like. My team is a speedball oriented team. So it fitted in amazingly well. I really like to play this type of tour.

Mike:
It’s pretty interesting how even a team that doesn’t communicate well, can hold up a good team, on the blisterball field. It’s one on one.

Todd:
It’s an individual game altogether. It’s very small. You can only fit three people up front, it’s a stacked type game. Basically, we tried to peel out in the first game, we played Black Rain on that field. We lost the toss. We had what we thought was the lesser of the two sides and tried to push up hard. The way we played was three up front, three right behind, then three back men and a guy to float around and make a move wherever he could. The back men were actually up too far and got taken out rapidly. Our front guys got taken out, our back guys got taken out, the game went very wrong and into a stalemate situation. We pushed on them at the end and they just took us out. That was it.

Mike:
So how would you approach the village field, which is closer to the sort of field that you would play back home, except that you probably wouldn’t have as many buildings and man-made structures on it?

Todd:
With the village field we decided that we were going to push the wires either way, ok. We figured that more teams would concentrate on the centre with it’s big bunkers, you can see each other, there’s more fighting. We figured that all we needed to do was send two people into the centre into those gigantic bunkers. Not so much up front, but into a safe zone, where a ball can barely reach you and they just elevated and concentrated on shooting. Shooting at both the corners where the other team would enter the Ôthick’ and letting our push sides know how many were going against us in that thick. We’d send 4 and 4 and pushed the wire that way. One side or the other, we would get through it. On the bottom side we favoured the right corner which is the thick, because we could get very far and they had to come out on a dog leg and run down into it.

Mike:
Did you think both ends were even on that field?

Todd:
I thought so. You could basically push from the top, somewhat from the top right thick and from the bottom right

Mike:
What about this field up here with the wooden barricades?

Todd:
Awesome, that field is headshot heaven. Basically, you can move, move, move. You put a guy’s head down, once he’s down you can move, like that. He pops up, you’re waiting for him right here. Instead of fighting it out with the guy, what you do is, once you put that guy down, you move to the next bunker and not really come out to shoot him per se but shoot his butt. It’s just a moving speedball field, that’s all it really is.

Mike:
It seemed to have a bottleneck in the middle of it that was very hard to get across.

Todd:
Yes, we favoured the top side due to the fact that we could get momentum running downhill. We could get down, past the bottleneck and out to the right corner. We couldn’t go all the way, there’s a creek and some big bunkers, that they make it to, no problem. So what we did is, we set up the back men to get to the bottleneck, the front of the bottleneck and shoot down that way, to stop them and let our men run on out and get to the front bunkers.

Mike:
Are you using any communications codes?

Todd:
Yeh. We have tons of codes. Like red white and blue. Red being left, white centre and blue being right. Communication and codes are the most important things in paintball. If you don’t know what’s going on, then you’re going to get stuck. I try to stay in the back and communicate as much as possible with each wire. Basically, to keep the team notified of what’s going on. Where people went on the breakout, so we know what we have. Then we try to angle our men in to cut them out. We’ve got sugar, which is a sweet spot per se. We have designated people to shoot at places like that, like where people will be running to on the breakout. If they’re going to go to the front bunker, I’ll have three guys trained on that front bunker, hosing it at the beginning of the game. That person’ll slide in, that person is gone. Those are usually the first people out in every game. To sweet spot, we call sugar, sugar white, sugar red. Our kill count is most important. It’s not so hard on these fields because they’re so small and they have to walk out right beside you.

Mike:
But obviously on a standard 10 man field, you’ve got to keep track of how many of them are out. They’re off to the the splat table and you’ve no idea of how many of them are gone.

Todd:
You’d have no idea of where everybody is, where the kills are coming from on the field and so forth, where they’re weak and where they’re not.

Mike:
Do you have a start, mid and end game strategy for a particular field, or do you have a series of strategies that you change as you go?

Todd:
Basically that would be it. We know the hot spots, we pick out the key points that we have to hold so that another player can’t move up and stop us from moving. We like to keep moving as much as possible. We don’t feel a stalemate is a win in our case, you either win or you lose, it’s not really a points game.

Mike:
In what sort of areas do you think that our Australian teams could improve their game?

Todd:
The Extremists that we played, they were a good team, ok. They had Tippmann Pro-Am’s and so forth. Guns that are good guns, but if it was cold they’d have a problem. We’re running all AutoMags with nitrogen. In a given situation, if they had the same gun as us that shoots 11 balls a second compared to a gun that shoots 6 balls a second, it would make a big difference. On fields like this you’re really relying on your gun, who can fire faster, who can fire more accurately. On a big field more strategy is involved, more movement can be done, more shifts and pushes, stuff like that. But I feel that Australian teams can be great teams. Given a little bit more practice. I talked to most of the teams and they play lots of tournaments, but many don’t practice as a team. They don’t go and practice a scrimmage over and over and over again. They more or less just go and play tournaments. Training is very important if you want to be a successful paintball team. You have to practice, you have to do drills and you have to scrimmage.

Mike:
What sort of training does Team Rage do?

Todd:
Our tournaments out of state are about a month and a half apart, so we have practice two Sunday’s a month, mandatory. I save one of those days for close scrimmage with another team, on the other Sunday we do drills. Closed practice sessions between ourselves, where we work on pushes and manoeuvres, all kinds of stuff. Just to start off, we do what’s called a ÔBucket Drill’, its a drill where we set up buckets about head height behind trees, taped to the trees, 10 of them, split off from wire to wire like on a regular field with a flag and a flag base. You have to start at your base, split through the middle, shoot at each bucket individually, mark each bucket, mark all ten buckets, grab the flag and run it back within one minute. Which is sort of tough. It’s a really tough drill. If they don’t make it, they have to do it over again until they do make it. It helps in the last minutes of a game where you have to make a push, get the flag and get it back as quickly as possible. We also do a lot of target shooting. We try to emphasise accuracy more than volume basically.

Mike:
What sort of range would you expect to shoot accurately over with a tournament gun?

Todd:
We shoot ‘R P Scherer Marballizer’ which is a very very accurate paint and a very heavy paint. You can shoot long distances. You can shoot longer with Marballizer, I feel, than any other paint, 75 to 100 feet accurately. That’s not yards that’s feet. All 10 players have to be able to play long ball, up close, in bunkers, crawling, so forth. We have crawling drills where we’ll put 2 guys in two bunkers, 2 guys covering for them and a guy trying to crawl on them. They have to take him down before he takes them down. We do a number of bunker drills. We’ll put a big player in a small bunker, he has to live in there for two minutes against two players, non stop. He has to shoot at them and try to eliminate them and that happens in games all the time. Basically that’s about it on drills. Close scrimmages we usually do before an up coming tournament. We play a team 10 on 10. Referees if possible, 25 minute games. There we can try different tactics, different stunts, we don’t care if we lose. We have to see what’s going to work for us and what’s not going to work for us and try to get it out there before we fly 10,000 miles somewhere else, try it and it doesn’t work. We set up different fields with different bunkers and then go out and walk the fields before we practice. Because it’s very important to read the fields and know your plays. Every field’s different. You’ve got to do something different on every field, basically.

Mike:
We’ll just close on your impressions of this tournament.

Todd:
Oh, I thought every team was of a high calibre here, they’re very good. The top teams need to initiate more, like I said, on practice and drills and that will make them superb teams. And, once that’s initiated in this country, paintball, it’s just going to grow. It’s going to be really big here. But other than that, this tournament, the Australian painballers, the whole karma, everybody’s so gung-ho. We usually show up an hour before to play an international tournament and we’re usually the first one’s there, everybody shows up late. We got here and it was still dark and every team was here, loaded, waiting to play. It’s a really great country to play paintball in.

Mike:
I hope you can come back and bring some more teams.

Todd:
Oh, we plan to, I want to come back. I want to come back to all the tournaments here. It’s amazing here. I want to get all the American teams out here and when that happens, it’s going to be huge. The teams that didn’t come to this have missed out.