It has been a long time since I last expressed myself, but with the preparation of D1, I have a little desire to share my thoughts. It is now 5 years since we created the club, this club whose year and year, the budget and the number of members enlarged.
It’s a great adventure, but why did it happen, what is our goal, why so much time and money spent on something that costs us without ever making a profit. I often said to myself, what is my life for, why am I here, only to work?, What is my goal. Idleness, laziness, procrastination is good I master :-D.
But I wanted to be a teacher, but out of necessity and the greed, easy of the commercial, got the better of me. For the past 5 years, I have rediscovered this desire to teach, to transmit, to support. The children make it good for us, loyal to the club, and only a minority of them give up the following season.
Now the question is why, we lose very few players each year, but, by having always as many, even more.
I think it lies in the projects we offer them. There is no rehearsal from year to year, things are changing.
Annoyed at not being able to register all of our U16s in the league for cost reasons (4 teams cost us € 1600 to register).
We tested a new tournament formula, close to the Christmas Cup that we created at the start of the U16. This will be called the Inter-Academy Under-16 Championship, it will be open to all U16 clubs in France and Navarre.
While maintaining a strong presence in the league with two teams instead of four, we will finally be able to play all of our members in competition. Because it ‘s through competition that they can prove themselves. We’ll tell you more soon, but Walter and I are already available to talk about it.
The thing with this club is that you don’t stop at least 16 years old.
From these U16s, this year, we were able to create a team in Division 3 ile de France. Composed of young people leaving U16 the previous season, as well as teenagers and young adults under 20, but all from our school. It’s a joy to be able to put together a team like this.
Tell yourself that some of them had never played or held a marker in caliber 68, or did not know how to reload… .but believe me, it was only a matter of minutes to master the beast.
So much a matter of minutes that two of them, Baptiste and Julien, joined the club’s division 1 team in the off-season to prepare for the French paintball scene.
I remember a question from Tavarez and P.Hauser during our first title in the French championship:
« How many players do you have left after the U16 », I could not answer this question, the project was so young. Today I can give figures.
In our team in division 1, on a roadster of 10 players, 5 come from the U16 school.
And all of that pushes me to continue because next year, we will have more players coming up. Here again, we will have to continue to propose projects, but without increasing the parents’ budget.
It works because the involvement of our members is total, next year we will even have a commercial / Marketing department
« Huh? what? you had a blast !! You will say to me, « you take yourself for the PSG » … well why not, if it was the recipe, the secret, always see bigger and give yourself the means. Because the easiest way to move forward is to have dreams, to share them and to fight for them … For 5 years we have been fighting for our dreams with Walter, we make our players dream and that is all worth it.
Coach Thierry
