Tunnel Vision

What is Tunnel Vision?

Tunnel vision is like looking down a pipe or tunnel and being oblivious to everything else going on around you. Whether you are an experienced paintball veteran or a new player, Tunnel vision is one of the human traits that you will constantly find yourself battling. Basically tunnel vision in paintball can best be described as a situation where you as a player are engaged with ONE player and your concentration is focused on only that player, leaving you oblivious to other players and situations that are developing all around you. I owned a paintball field for five years and I refereed too many games to count. Newbie games, team practices, tournaments, you name it. The one MAJOR difference between newbies and experienced players is in the way that they react to changes in the game around them. Newbies (an many newer teams) fall into a lazy habit of running out of their flag station and picking a spot, be it a tree or bunker of some type. They then look for an opponent and "duke it out". This style of play will never win a tournament game.

How Tunnel Vision causes many teams to lose games:

Imagine for a second that you are on a team that has a line of players stretched across the field. You walked the fields (briefly) and everyone has a pre-determined position. Each player is shooting at someone directly in front of them. There is little communication between all of the players - sound familiar? Time after time I have seen this scenario and what happens many times to teams like this is that when they play another team with more experience, things can go very wrong. For example, if one of your tape (side) players gets eliminated, the lack of communication doesn’t alert the rest of the team. Since all of your players suffer from tunnel vision, they aren’t looking around the field to monitor the action. As a result, most players miss the fact that you lost one of your key players. What happens next is where it gets really ugly. The better team sends someone up the tape where there now exists a whole in your line. This player now has several key advantages: 1. your team doesn’t know how many players you have, 2. your team doesn’t know he is there, 3. this player has a tremendous "angle" on all of your players, 4. Your players leave themselves exposed because they are too worried about getting the player that is directly in front of them. These advantages allow the player to take a bunker on YOUR SIDE of the field, along side or behind your players. By this point your players can not manage the angle between the players in front of them and the player now behind them.

If you are a new team trying your hand at tournaments then you have probably had this happen to you. In the example above I actually touched on a couple of issues that will be addressed in future articles such as walking the field & choosing positions, communication and codes, swinging, and more. For now lets look at ways to improve player concentration and reduce tunnel vision.

Spread out your attention span

Think of your attention span as a pie. Not a blueberry pie but a pie in the sense that you have a limited amount of attention to spread around. If you concentrate too much on one thing, then you don’t have enough attention to spend on other things happening around you. Many times we watch the Olympic and see gymnasts that perform amazing feats of skill, strength and balance. Ice skaters are also a good example of this. If a skater is too worries about making one particular jump, they will probably fail in some other area of their routine. Many athletes train in real-world conditions to mimic actual competition. This can give a real advantage because when the actual competition arrives, they have already performed their routines hundreds of times. For a paintball player, the small tasks are the ones that you can’t let dominate your attention.

Being Fearless Doesn’t Win Tournaments

To a new player, advanced tournament players appear to be fearless. They push, they run, they crawl in dangerous places, and they bunker players. I have seen teams that incorrectly translate this into their team’s style of play by thinking that being fearless will win games. I have even seen one team that tried to PRACTICE BUNKERING EACH OTHER. The only thing that happened was a near fist fight. Great tournament players are NOT fearless. They may have no fear of the pain from an actual paintball hit, but they DO have fear of being eliminated. This is an important distinction.

Tricks to Use Tunnel Vision to Your Advantage

Since MOST player fall victim to tunnel vision at one time or another, it is important to use this to your advantage. If the player in front of you is only shooting at YOU, then he sin’t shooting at your teammate. If he sin’t shooting at your teammates, then he isn’t LOOKING at them either. So every time that you draw him out to shoot at you, your teammate gets an OPEN CLEAR SHOT. This is how most games are won. An important aspect of getting elimination involves timing and angles. If you can keep that guy’s head up for a second, and another one of you players works with you, then together you can use the "V" shape of your alignment to give the opponent less cover. Here is another personal skill trick: while you are playing and sparring with the player in front of you, ask yourself: "can he really hit me as long as I am behind this bunker/tree?" and "can I shoot at someone else with exposing myself to the payer in front of me?".

The point is do your HAVE to spend all of your pie on him? Is he worth ALL of your attention? The answer should be no unless he is:

a.) VERY close to you.
b.) you are being angled badly by a combination of opponents
c.) you are in real danger of being bunkered by the player in font of you.
d.) All of the above.

These exceptions are usually end-game situations that we will discuss in other articles.

1. Divide your attention.
2. Talk to your player next to you and ask him "what do ya got?"
3. Contribute something to your team.

Use the time that you freed-up by not being worried about the guy in front of you to actually CONTRIBUTE something to the other players on your team. You should feel guilty every time you walk off the field after playing a game where you fell into the trap of concentrating on only one player. Be your own critic and don’t wait for your teammates to say "I could have really used more help out there". When you free yourself to LOOK around the field, you will have more TARGETS and you will have a better picture of what’s happening on the field. Good players can manage more than one player and GREAT players can handle three or more. It may be that you have a "hold" player in front of you that has no intentions of ever moving. You will know this to be true if it is late in the game and the guy is still not a major threat. As long as someone else has angle on him, you need to get out of there so you can help the team. ALWAYS ask yourself multiple times during every game "what could I be doing to help the team right now?". Sometimes you can leave the "hold" player there, thinking that you are still there. He won’t push because he is a wimpy hold player. If you can swing across the back of the field, then you TOTALLY mess up the competition’s heads by screwing with their count.

That’s about it. When you feel yourself staring at only one player, slap yourself in the face and wake up to the WHOLE game. You job is tom make an IMPACT in the game. If you get killed in the process, that may or may not be acceptable given the circumstances. Be afraid of getting hit, but NEVER be afraid to spread-out your focus.

--JL