Tryouts are DONE!

Finally it's done. Probably the longest two weekends for me as a player seeing as how I didn't get to play....at all. Not to mention I had to crush some dreams of fellow paintballers, which is no fun to do either. On the other hand, a set of players have now been given the chance I was given about 4 years ago. When I made the team (with my good friend Ryan Brand), we were the 15th and 16th guys on the team. With no chance at a starting spot, our only option that year was to work our ass off and wait for that one opportunity. Mine came in Chicago of that year. I can't even remember why I was put in but I knew I had that one chance to play well or I'd continue to ride the pine. If I made a single mistake that one game, I'd have to wait again til the stars aligned for another chance. I can't remember the exact details but I believe me and Dixon had to pull off a big 2 on 4 against Aftermath. We would go on to win the match and I continued to play for the rest of that tournament and the rest of the year.

/rant

Enough of that, now back to the tryouts. We mainly just played games these past two days. The wind really picked up today so we weren't able to play as much as I hoped but we accomplished what we set out to do. Find a group of players I thought would be capable of one day playing pro. I don't look at our semi-pro team as just a semi-pro team, but a group of players that have the potential and the drive to one day play pro. The amount of raw talent on this team is unreal. It's now up to us veteran X-factor guys to groom them into a well oiled machine. So here's the names of ballplayers that have been added to our roster (some have already been in the system but we'll make it official)...

Arnold Haffner
Kevin Lam
Mark Johnson
Shon Saucedo
Derek Knight
Ashton Johnson
Ryan Perez
Trevor Resar
Ross Saunders
Demetri Ninios
Adam Hitchcock
Taylor Kurtz
Jeremy Zimmerman
Jamie Ezell
Mitchell (from Austin)

Congrats guys and see you in two weeks!