It was six days after their last tournament and you could still see their bruises.
"Once you get over the initial stinging period, you are good to go," said Keri Parsons, looking down at a small blue and black mark on her shoulder.
Her teammate, Michael P. Morris, wasn't so lucky.
"I've been pretty riddled," Morris said, pointing to a silver-dollar-sized bruise on his upper arm. "And that's a small one. I've had them go from here all the way down, one big bruise."
The team takes its licks and dishes them out in a monthly tournament in Anchorage that draws paintball teams from all over Alaska.
Teams of three to five players race against a five-minute clock to run and shoot their way across a basketball court-sized field dotted with inflatable bunkers and grab the opponent's flag.
Hang the flag in the center and your team wins the game and earns 50 points. Get shot and you earn nothing but another bruise.
In her first year of competition, Parsons said she is hooked.
"I play because of the adrenaline, the rush of it," she said. "It's painful, but it's fun."
Morris said he has played other, more conventional sports like baseball and soccer, but paintball was the only sport he could really get into.
"I like it, it's really fast-paced," he said. "And the one thing I notice about the tournaments is that the sportsmanship is a lot higher with paintball."
Both players said most players on the other 20-plus teams at the tournaments many of whom have played competitively for years were willing to give advice and encouragement to their younger team.
This advice is starting to pay off for the SpitRats.
In their first tournament earlier this summer they finished dead last. But last Saturday the team improved to fourth place.
"Everyone is starting to stand up and take notice of the Homer teams because we're bringing a good quality of paintball, despite our lack of anywhere to practice," Morris said.
Jake Werlein, a paintballer for Homer's other speedball team, the Outlaw Syndicates, has been plastering friends with paintballs for more than three years in pick-up games around Homer. He started his own tournament team this year.
Werlein said speedball takes a bit more strategy than unorganized games. Players need to form a plan and figure out their positioning before the game begins.
After the bell rings, however, strategy often takes a back seat to survival.
"It's like that saying in boxing," Werlein said. "It's all planning and theory until that first punch is thrown."
Unlike boxing, you don't have to be athletic to be good at paintball.
"You could be a big, chubby, 300-pound guy and do just as well in paintball as somebody that cross trains and runs a quarter mile in 10 seconds," Werlein said.
While most of the teams at the tournaments are made of players in their teens to early 30s, there is a small group of 10- to 12-year-olds from Anchorage who compete regularly.
The tournaments cost $100 per team to enter and the players must buy their own gear and paintballs.
Gun prices range from $100 to more than $1,400. Accessories and safety gear can raise the total bill for diehard paintballers to well over $2,000, but people can compete with less of an investment.
"It doesn't matter if you have a $200 gun or a $2,000 gun," Werlein said. "Everyone treats you just the same."
Everything's fair, it seems, in love and paintball.
For more information about paintball in Homer check out www.homerpaintball.com.
en Stuart can be reached at ben.stuart@homernews.com.
In the tournaments, the game of choice is called speedball, a sort of urban warfare offshoot of the popular capture-the-flag game often played in the woods around Homer.
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