Hurricanes Come To Florida

It’s kind of ironic to announce the arrival of the NE Hurricanes for a Florida practice during the current season of such natural, violent storms - especially when it takes place during the impending arrival of Katrina - but ever since the team's base transplanted to the New England area, its inevitable that a big deal would be made out of their return to the sunshine and tropical storm state.

Jeff Stein, intellectual analyst and team manager extraordinaire was invited to attend a mid-season practice at the new Doc's Raiders facility, located and hastily being completed at First Coast paintball just outside of MacClenny, Florida.  (For you non-Floridians, that's just about a half hour to the west of Jacksonville.)

Attending along with the Hurricanes crew were John Rathburn’s Chicago Evil team, (John was happy to be back in his native Florida where his paintball career began, but not happy to be reminded of the heat and humidity...), Doc and his Raiders, the perennial Jacksonville area pros, Jax Intensity - somewhat of a Raider's farm team, Team Strange (who doesn't know who those guys are) and, making a brief appearance on Sunday, the Vengeance Factory Team, who were extremely honored and blown away to have been invited by the Hurricanes and actually managed to get in a few games.

The new training facility being erected by Doc is an ambitious undertaking, complete with observation tower, sodded fields, a newly constructed gravel road (with its own private entrance to the facility), dedicated air and electrical system and, I'm sure, much more to come.

As such practices go, it was generally low-key, with the vast majority of the comments directed at the oppressive heat; the Hurricanes looked good, if a little sloppy on day one, but that didn't keep them from winning the majority of their scrimmages.  By Sunday, whatever kinks there were had been ironed out - no doubt by a good nights rest at the hotel (yeah, right!), and the team was clicking on overdrive.  Evil seemed to be doing equally well - and they seemed to be doing a lot of roster changes out on the field.  Without a program to go by, this is just a guess, but it might be that Evil is shaking things up a bit among their front line.

Sunday was also the occasion of a telephone interview by Evan Money for his syndicated paintball radio show, and the announcement of a set of signed-by-the-pros airball bunkers provided by a relatively new field manufacturer - JaBam.

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