Canadian Scenario Paintball Operations, brainchild of Kris Taylor and Kyle Thorpe in Vancouver, BC Canada has grown from a humble $20 marketing budget and a website and an idea in Vancouver to one of the largest paintball teams in North America.

Starting out on a shoestring and an idea January 1st 2007, the website has grown to over 500 active members enlisted in squads ranging from Canada’s westernmost city of Victoria, BC to it’s easternmost city of St. Johns, NF.  That's over 5000 kilometres of paintball mayhem.  The team has squads based in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Newfoundland.  The group is growing at a rate of 5-10 new members per week and is achieving hit rates of 5000-9000 hits per day.

"We wanted to take scenario paintball in Canada to the next level," states Taylor, "there was Special Ops paintball in the United States but nothing Canada-focused." 

The website features hours of video, thousands of photos, and one of the busiest and most active forums in the Canadian scenario paintball arena. 

"This thing is absolutely exploding," states Thorpe, noting that in 2008 CSPO will be hosting it's first scenario paintball games outside of the group's heartland of Vancouver-on Vancouver Island, in Saskatchewan, and in Ontario-making the group truly national.

In 2007, the group launched the CSPO Hired Guns Woodsball Tournament Series of games, where all competing squads enter the field at the same time in a voracious battle over a case, and the squads get paid out $2-$4 per minute in cold hard cash the moment they hit the dead zone.  "The game was a fantastic hit," says Scott Pick, the group’s dedicated videographer and cameraman, "I used to play at Panther and now we've run one of the most successful games I think I’ve ever seen at that field -we used the entire 30 acres and the field was just packed with combat."

In a break from many popular websites, the group regularly deletes any members who have not logged in after 120 days, in order to keep the usernames available for more active members.  The group has exceeded 500 active members and is growing fast.

The group also puts on highly organized "outlaw" games (games that take place not on a regular paintball field) and coins the genre  "adventure tourism".  "We want the players to get that pit in their stomach, that feeling like the first day of paintball they ever played that tells them, 'uh, maybe I shouldn’t have signed up for this'", chuckles Taylor.  The group charters landing craft for beach assaults on islands in the middle of the city, or heads to remote locations, getting all the necessary permissions and alerting authorities, of course.

The CSPO website can be found at www.canadianscenariopaintball.com and includes areas for commercial entities and paintball fields to advertise for free, event listings in Canada, as well as multimedia.

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