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 and I loved the sport, but more than any of it I loved the people, and many of them became lifelong friends.
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, and that connection to the game never really left.
When I finally came back, it was through one of those close friends, and I quickly realised I was essentially a rookie again. The game had evolved, the scene had shifted, and the whole landscape was unfamiliar. Out of natural curiosity I set out to find my way back in, to track down the active fields, see where the tournaments were, work out who was running things, and learn who the teams were.
Because I am a professional photographer, a qualified teacher, and someone who has always loved playing around with technology, I naturally started collecting data to make sense of it all. It is simply what I do to learn. Turning that research into a functional digital tool was never a stretch, because that is how my mind works.
The reality of our sport is that its information has always been scattered, and there has never been one place that pulled it all together. What began as a personal project to find my bearings grew into something much larger. Today that foundation has become four web apps, Genesis, Verdict, Oracle, and Eden, all of them actively in development.
Whether people use these tools or not is almost beside the point, because I am going to keep building them either way. This is what happens when a lifelong passion for the sport meets decades of experience in design and technology. I love this game, and I want to build up and strengthen the community around it.
What OSP isn't
To understand what OSP is, it helps to understand what it isn't.
It isn't here to take over. Plenty of dedicated people and organisations have given years to making this sport what it is, and OSP has no interest in replacing or competing with any of them. My aim is the opposite. I want to add something useful alongside the work they are already doing, and to put the abilities I have toward strengthening the scene rather than steering it. What I can offer is a single place that brings the scattered information together, and that is what I am building.
It isn't built for the rest of the world. OSP is made specifically for Australian and New Zealand tournament paintball, shaped around our part of the world and how our scene actually operates.
It doesn't claim to be perfect. The data depends on human input, so gaps and errors will happen. I would rather be open about that than pretend everything is correct all the time.
The vision
This is a genuine passion project. Maybe it is a case of having a little too much time on my hands, but it is a challenge I am determined to see through. I am offering these tools to the community in the hope that other players find real value in them.
In the end, a more informed and consolidated scene is a stronger and more competitive one, and that means more people playing paintball. That is what I actually want out of all of this.