Your team’s ability to communicate plays a large roll in the outcome of your AC Paintball game. Communication is an issue many teams struggle with not only in paintball but in other team sports as well. If players don’t let their teammates know what they are doing, they are more likely to run into problems that prevent the team from succeeding. Some paintball fields are large which makes communicating across it even more difficult, especially when your team is spread out and you need to make sure everyone knows what is going on.

If you want to help your team achieve victory at AC Paintball, you should help make sure your team knows how to communicate well. To help you accomplish this, AC Paintball in southern New Jersey has compiled this list for communicating and relaying message across the field.

What Is Important to Communicate?

To start, it is important to know what type of information should be communicated. The three most common pieces of information are about movement and strategy changes, positioning, and kill counts. Your team should know what they are up against at all times.

Movement and Strategy

Your team should have an idea of what to expect moving forward. This way they can prepare themselves ahead of time and improve their chances of successfully executing their roles. Some examples of information you will want to let your teammates know include:

• You want to move from one bunker to another.
• You need backup.
• You are out of paintballs.
• You are going to deviate from the team’s original plans.

Positioning

It is also important to know where both your teammates and your opponents are at all times. During an AC Paintball Speedball game where the field is small and open, it can be fairly easy to see where everyone is. However, during a Woodsball game, it is more difficult to see everyone and communication becomes more crucial.

A good way to communicate where you are on the field is by splitting the field into nine different areas and assigning numbers to those areas. You can picture a keypad on a phone and order the areas in a similar fashion. For example, the back left corner of the AC Paintball field would be zone 1, the back middle would be zone 2, the back right would be zone 3, midfield on the left would be zone 4 and so on.

Kill Counts

It is always good to know how many players are left on your team, and how many players are left on your opponent’s team. One of the simplest ways to do this is similar to how you would report a score for various other sports. You give two numbers. The first is how many players are left on your team and the second is how many are left on the opponents team. So if your team has 7 players left and your opponents have 6, you would say 7-6.

Develop a System

Once you know what information needs to be communicated, you need to know how you are going to communicate it. You need to figure out how you will get the message from one side of the AC Paintball field to the other.

One way to do this is a sort of snake pattern. Determine a communication order ahead of time, based on where each player will be positioned on the field. Then have each position responsible for communicating the message to the next person in line until the message reaches the opposite end of the field. When using this method, be sure that players know the order of other teammates around them just in case someone gets eliminated.

Make Sure Your Message is Short and Clear

One problem that can often occur while trying to communicate with your team is players not fully understanding one another. It can be just like playing whisper down the alley where the message starts out meaning one thing, but as it is retold each time the message can be changed to be something totally different. You need to make sure your message is clear. Some good ways to accomplish this are to be loud (when appropriate), keep the message concise, and repeat the message.

Don’t Give Away Important Info to the Other Team

While it is good to be loud to make sure your teammates can hear you, you also have to think about your opponents. You don’t want them learning important information that they can use against you. Therefore, you should develop a quiet communication system you can use to send messages across the AC Paintball field. Here are three common quiet communication systems you can use.

Hand Signals

Body language is a communication system that nearly everyone understands. If you point, you want someone to look at something, if you wave your hand in a certain direction you want the person to move in that direction, and if you hold up a fist or a flat vertical hand, you want someone to stop what they are doing. You can also create some unique hand motions for your team that only they will understand. Just make sure you don’t create so many that it becomes difficult to remember them all.

Code Words

Code words can be used a bit more loudly than the other communication systems. Their advantage is they mean something that is only understood by your team, at least to start. Your opponents can catch on to what code words mean, so you should only use them sparingly. When using code words pick something somewhat arbitrary that means something associated to paintball. For instance, the term “fox” could mean that you spotted an opponent hiding somewhere.

Walkie-Talkies

Walkie-Talkies are one of the best ways to be fairly quiet while getting a message across the AC Paintball field. They are useful when the rest of your teammates are not within your viewing range. However, there are some things to watch out for. It is good to use it somewhat sparingly just in case a teammate is trying to communicate something important and you are preventing them from doing so. You will also want to be careful that you don’t accidentally hold the talk button down while crawling or leaning against something.

Practice at AC Paintball

Finally, you will want to practice. The best way to improve your communication system is to keep trying to use it and correcting issues that you find. Team building exercises can also be helpful to allow your team to get to know each other better. This way they are more comfortable talking to each other and understand how each other thinks. If you are ready to practice communicating with your team, schedule a session at AC Paintball now!