Your pulse quickens. Condensation builds inside your mask from rapid out-breaths as your senses heighten to every thwack and pop of paintballs whizzing by at 280 feet per second. You anticipate the projectile’s strike, just hoping it hits somewhere fleshy, and walk out of the arena looking like a Jackson Pollack masterpiece, bruised, but no worse for wear.
For most people, the sport of paintball is the closest thing to actual ground combat that can be safely experienced, and River Park Paintball, located near the entrance of River Park, is the only game in town for Lompoc enthusiasts.
Jim and Audrey Mosby, the field’s owners, have leased out or run the arena themselves for the past five years. Over a period of five months, Jim built the urban-themed scenario course completely out of recycled materials, turning idle land into a place for youth to paintball legally.
“You play in the [Santa Ynez] riverbed, you get a ticket,” Jim Mosby said. “So we put them in a controlled environment that’s insured, with referees and everything. They’ve got an itch, and we’re scratching it for them.”
Born and raised in Lompoc, Shawn “Regie” Ryan was one of those kids who used to play in the dry riverbed. Now, he’s a semipro paintballer who’s frequented River Park since it opened.
“When I was a kid, I didn’t have a place like this to enjoy,” Ryan said. “I didn’t have people that were older and knew about the sport to mentor me and tell me what to do. Kids come out here, and they look up to us like gods sometimes.” Open on weekends from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the field draws dozens of paintball players young and old, regularly playing host to birthdays and company parties. Paintballer Damian Osuna visits from Santa Barbara to play and referee nearly every weekend.
“It’s a great cardio workout,” Osuna said of the sport. “You’re always sprinting from point A to point B. It’s a lot of fun to get your friends together, come on up, and spend the day shooting each other.”
To play, visitors must be 10 years or older and sign a release form. There’s a $10 entry fee, and players can either use their own guns or rent them. The basic package is $35 for all necessary equipment, $10 for carbon dioxide, or $25 for a day’s worth of compressed air.
Most players hit the scenario course first for team deathmatches. Once through the gates, teams are divided up and the action begins with referees monitoring the action. After players are shot, they raise their guns and head out, and the last team standing wins.
In the scenario game, being stealthy has its advantages. The more adventurous and hard-charging players move on to the adjacent Elements Arena speedball course, which employs inflatable bunkers. Speedball, as the name implies, is a supercharged version of paintball, with fewer places to hide and more ammunition spent.
Ryan said after being introduced to speedball, there was no turning back.
“It’s the longest seven minutes of your life,” he said, adding it’s not uncommon to go through an entire case of 10,000 paintballs in a single seven-minute speedball game.
Ryan is a member of Elements Paintball, a group of semipro players who joined forces with the Mosbys in running the Elements speedball arena. With their experience in traveling to other fields, Ryan and the rest of the Elements crew are in the process of expanding and revamping the field and establishing a new semipro speedball team.
Once the field is complete, the goal for course organizers is to invite teams from Northern and Southern California to compete against each other.
“We want it to be worth coming out for, and we want it to be talked about when they leave,” said Scott “Strawberry” House, another partner of the Elements team.
House has been paintballing for 13 years, from the Pennsylvania woods to the fields of Guam. He currently plays at River Park every weekend, and loves the aggressive and athletic nature of the sport. In paintball, he said, size doesn’t matter, and to excel one must rely on wits and instinct.
“You could be the fastest, most athletic person out there, and if you’re not smart, you’re not going to be able to do much,” House said. “Being smart and learning the game is pretty much the most important thing, and to be fearless is the other.”
Though getting struck with a paintball can sting and raise nasty welts, House said pain is no longer an issue at the semipro level.
The variation of possible paintball games stretches as far as the imagination. A typical tournament game is played seven-on-seven; a variant called “XBall” is typically played with teams of five, composed of multiple timed rounds of capture the flag.
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As beginners, players start out at the rookie level and move up through the divisions, accumulating points based on how well their team performs. The folks at the top of the food chain can be invited to join the professional ranks; the National Professional Paintball League is the main pro league, and holds seven-person tournaments nationwide.
Locally, the West Coast Paintball Players League oversees tournaments in California, and teams play in five events per year in different cities. Tournaments can get expensive; teams regularly spend more than $1,000 on paint alone for a single event, not to mention the thousands more spent on entry fees, traveling, and hotels.
River Park and Elements Arena organizers are hoping to make their venue a nonprofit, benefiting those who can’t drive far to practice for tournaments. According to Elements’ co-owner Albert Diaz, River Park will eventually be host to local tournaments and league-sanctioned events. Organizers are also planning on operating day camps for at-risk teenagers, instructing them on the sport and running them in competitions against each other. The field is scheduled to bring in Boys and Girls Clubs from Carpinteria and Goleta for a tournament on July 12, and operators plan on more community outreach.
Despite the enthusiasm and support, River Park Paintball has recently been threatened with closure. After disagreements with a previous tenant, the course closed down in February, only to reopen in May. The course is slowly gaining back players, however the Mosbys—who have also built a track for remote control cars and soccer fields on their land—recently received a letter from Santa Barbara County officials demanding $24,000 in conditional use permits.
“Let’s just hope that we can afford to pay the permits to keep ourselves in business,” Audrey Mosby said. “If it’s not cost effective, we’ll just close everything down. We’ll have no choice.”
Elements Paintball co-owner Toni Diaz said River Park plays a valuable role for the youth of Lompoc, and she hopes to see the course flourish.
“Our main goal is to have places for kids to go, to have positive people who want to be around them, and make things better for them,” she said. “Life brings a lot of obstacles, and we want them to have a place where it’s a stress-free environment, to have people to look up to and just have fun.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas paintballs with all the colors of the wind. Contact him at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 30 – Jul 7, 2011.