Introduction:
Due to popular demand PE has opened up its’ history achieves to divulge our past. This is done in the spirit that it may be of aid to younger teams who are trying to find their own way and will be continued with each passing season. Hopefully this history helps but our dedication into perspective and aid other struggling "clubs" trying to ascend to the "team" status. Speedball is the obvious way to go with a team, it’s the path more traveled. Speedball isn’t want we’re interested in, woodsball is. To make this easy to read I set it up in chronological order by summers, our official “seasons”, the time we usually play the most. Here’s our story:
Prologue
For me I was introduced to paintball by Ghost my junior year of high school. He had been playing for years and started me out with a BE stingray and a 45 round hopper. Needless to say I got ripped a new one a few times but I was hooked. After that we played with Sun Down and others every few weekends. I was so excited by this sport that I got Wolf Spider into it after high school. We were just kids then having a good time and not taking it to seriously.
Summer of 2001
High School was over or ending for most of us at this point. We had the demo version of Medal of Honor when it came out and Ghost (calling himself Maverick) and I kick butt on the servers. After numerous declarations from other players that we are cheating we decided to start a clan. I came up with the idea of the Pretorian Elite. Also with the same breath Ghost decided we should start a paintball team and named in Absolute Zero (the point that due to the temperature all molecules stop moving, not the drink, nor being losers). I started a PE website on tripod and had a few images of MOH stuff and we continued to play as the full version came out. At the height of our strength we had a total of 3 members! Myself, Maverick, and his brother Ceaser (now PE Gambit). We were a force to be reckoned with. On the side we played paintball every few weeks, nothing serious just some fun games.
Summer of 2002
After some time summer of '02 came around and we started playing paintball again and sort of dropped out of the MOH crowd. I personally shifted over to Day of Defeat and Ceasar took on the Age of Empires world, and won too. Still the Absolute Zero team was non-existent. That summer was a transitional period as Wolf Spider became more involved and bought himself a Pro-Carbine. Shortly after I had just bought a Piranha STS G3. At this point we played in the woods because it was cheaper and shorter drive for us.
After that summer we all went back to college but played somewhat over winter break where most of our guns failed in the cold as we struggled to run in two feet of snow. And as a "team" we were crushed by the opposition in an unofficial match against friends. This is when Ghost got Flea to come play with us.
Summer of 2003
So when then ‘03 summer came along I talked with Ghost and we decided to take the team thing more seriously and reactivate the moth balled Pretorian Elite site and called it our home. We kept the name but everything else changed, stripped the site down to more of a news board and started an on-line forum with "aimoo." Our first official practice was on 5/13. Still at that point most thought we were not so much a team as merely a club. A major turning point in that summer was our first match on 7/13 against Tug Boatz! Oddly enough it was just me and Ghost battling against a mixed team of veteran speedballers and noobs. 8 games played over 3 hours leaving PE: 7 and TB: 1. Vistors, TB had one man over PE as well as some great shooters and superior fire power. We used mobile decisive thrusts to win most of the rounds. Afterwards I started spending more time trying to get pictures and new graphics into the site in hopes of better unifying the team and getting people involved. We were all starting to figure out who we were as a team and why we preferred the woods for reasons of greater experience and more tactical options. So ended our first season with a group picture, hiding in the forest (the intro to the site).
Summer of 2004
We had a Turkey Shoot game over Thanksgiving Break, which was incredibly frustrating due to the fog, but did not really meet as a team again until the next summer. The "aimoo" forum died out and I moved us to the "voy" forums. This was a critical time as we introduced a number of team issues to be debated while we are slowly preparing to return home. One issue was the patch design, our team logo. I drew up 8 designs based on my ideas with suggestions from the team and they were voted upon. Next issue was a team uniform, the result was the German made Flectar camo. The last big issue, was how to structure the team with a ranking system and creation of squads. After a lot of debate three squads; recon, offense, defense were decided upon and a limited command and control system I created. Next came the voting of the three coordinators who would lead those squads. It is also around this time that proudly I became an Administrator for the Armotech forums.
Finally we were more ready to tackle other teams for the ‘04 season as it began on 5/11. We became honing our drills and tactics and solidly defeated M-Crew on 6/13. It was a best out of three match spanning two weekends The first match was with a mixture of CTF, Elimination, and King of the Hill rounds which left the score PE: 3 and the Crew: 2, with one draw round. While M-Crew was new to the area and played with one less man they fought hard and got us good several times. A few near broken bones and bleeding cuts later PE ended the match with a victorious CTF round. The Second Match a week later had all Elimination rounds as to M-Crew's request that left PE: 3 and the Crew: 0 with again one draw round. What came next was the first awarding of the new Victoria Cross medals that Flea designed. The second half of the summer had some rough spots as life happened and we were not as activate but we finally got our
team patches and rank patches for our uniforms. We dropped the "voy" forum for the sleeker "invisionfree" one.
Winter of 2004 / 2005
This is the first winter we had a lot going on. Wolf Spider and I, being in western New York together decided to start up a PE chapter there. The chapter was called the Primo Legio York Nova (1st New York Legion). Since we had that chapter named we had to come up with a name for our original CT chapter. Primo Legio Conticus (1st Connecticut Legion) was picked. Then during X-mass break Ghost and I journeyed to Mass to play a game with Team PUD and Yankee Division. This is where I meet James Miles face to face, a part own of Armotech, and we were soon sponsored by his own store of Devil Mountain Sports.