Non-baseball news from the QC

There has been a lot of River Bandit news out of Davenport. While checking for the latest this morning, there was this at the sports section of QCTimes.com.

Q-C paintball team leaves mark on Midwest

Pop, pop, pop.

Pow.

Ouch.

These are several sounds that can be heard while playing paintball. And the Timberlords of MVP Paintball of the Quad-Cities have heard something else. Champs.

From April 15th through Nov. 11th, the team of captain Brian Wilson, Don Paschal, Chad Bennett, Micah Miller, Ben Lewis, Mike Unger, Kyle VanVoltenburg, Joe Prais and Chris Thomas made seven trips to Chicago to compete in the Division II regional Chi-Town Series Paintball competition.

It began with 16 teams from Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois.

Members of the Timberlords are from around the Quad-Cities and range from having played for only four years up to 20. The team has played all over the country, from Orlando, Fla., to Los Angeles to Texas.

Speedball is the game of choice at the tournament, and it is likened to a game of capture the flag. Most games last only about 5 minutes in a best two out of three format.

Timberlords. Now, that would have been a great baseball team nickname.

Strategy? You bet.

“You shoot one or two guys off the break, it’s a totally different game,” Bettendorf’s Joe Prais said. “It’s like a power play in hockey.”

The break is the beginning of the match, where a horn sounds, and the teams take off from their home base, trying to capture the flag. But of course, you are trying to dodge a half-inch paintball flying at 300 feet per second or roughly 200 mph coming from five guys, firing 30 balls a second.

Sounds like fun. You know who else likes paintball?