In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I lived and breathed tournament paintball, playing professionally for the JunkYard Dogs, JYD. I loved the fierce competition, I loved the sport, and I loved the people in it.
Then life took over, and I stepped away from the field for the better part of two decades. Yet what stayed with me were those people. There was always that connection to paintball.
When I finally came back, I was essentially a rookie again. The game had evolved, the scene had shifted, and the landscape was completely unfamiliar. Out of natural curiosity, I just wanted to find my way. I wanted to find the active fields, see where the tournaments were, figure out who was running things, understand the state of the tournament circuit, and learn who the teams were.
Because I am a professional photographer, educator, and web developer, I naturally started to collect data to figure it all out. It's just what I do to learn and make sense of things. Translating that research into a functional digital tool wasn't a stretch. It's simply how my mind works.
The reality of our sport is that the information has always been scattered. There has never been one place that consolidated it all. What started as a personal project to find my bearings grew into something much larger. Today, that foundation has evolved into four distinct pillars, Genesis, Verdict, Oracle, and Eden, all of which are actively in development.
Whether someone uses these tools or not is irrelevant to me. I am still going to build them. This is what happens when a lifelong passion for the sport intersects with decades of technical design and development experience. I love this game, and I love the community built around it.
What OSP isn't
To understand what OSP is, it helps to understand exactly what it isn't.
It doesn't try to take over. There are other organisations and bodies moving towards making paintball great, and there are some incredible people who have dedicated their lives to the development of this sport. OSP doesn't exist to replace or displace them. I just want to add something of value to the scene, a centralised place that holds everything and brings all the information together at the same time.
It isn't built for the rest of the world. OSP is engineered specifically for Australian and New Zealand tournament paintball. It is made for our area of the world and how our scene actually operates.
It doesn't claim perfection. Data is driven by human input, and gaps will happen. Transparency matters more than pretending it is 100% correct all the time.
The vision
This is a dedicated passion project. Maybe it's just a case of having too much time on my hands, but it is a challenge I am pushing myself to see through. I am offering these tools to the community in the hope that other players find value in them.
Ultimately, a more informed, consolidated scene is a stronger, more competitive scene, and that means more people playing paintball, which is what I actually want out of all this.