Team Building Exercises or Corporate Away Days are important not simply for the euphoric feeling of the immediate experience or the ‘Thank You’ that the action of taking your team out for the day shows ten times over what an email saying ‘thanks’ could do. Team building is also an exceptional way to get a team working together, for group skills, communication, bonding and of course a healthy serving of inter-team competition!

Former Leicester Tigers rugby team centre Matt Cornwell re-join the club in the role of first team manager in April this year. Matt grew up around Leicester and visited Armourgeddon and Chaos Paintball numerous times in his youth. Too good an opportunity to miss, as part of an away day for his team, Matt has organised an afternoon of paintball for the 1st and 2nd team in the sunshine at Armourgeddon.

Following a morning of training and singing (nope, we aren’t too sure how that fits in either…), Matt and 30 of his players arrived at Armourgeddon. Once the Chaos Paintball team had finished panicking about the sizing of the overalls and had found jackets that just about fitted over the arms of the likes of new signing Locky McCaffrey and longtime team and British & Irish Lions player Tom Croft, it was time to share out the ammunition and get paintballing!

A carefree, laidback, not at all competitive group (as if!!), the players did all they could to sneak extra paintballs, scupper the chances of their team mates and generally cause havoc to each other as they prepared for battle!

Split into two teams, the first headed off on the landing craft to prepare the defence of the top paintball wood from the attacking team. Once in position, the attacking team were loaded into the back of the landing craft and driven into battle. Imagine the D-Day landings but replace the beaches for woodland! Hidden behind obstacles and hiding places, the defending team had the opportunity to shoot the attackers as they came off the craft, still getting to grips with the controls of the Inferno gas powered semi automatic paintball markers.

The 10 minutes of mass fire-power saw most of the attacking players hit at least once, allowed the 1 minute sin-bin stay and then back into the game. The game is over either when all the defending players have been hit or the attackers have run out of time, whichever comes first. The Blue team took control hitting all of the Green team players within 8 minutes 24 seconds and then defending their position for the full 10 minutes.

From the launch area it was on to Radar Lorry. In this game, the attacking team starts deep in the forest. The defenders have to maintain control of a truck emitting a radar signal. The Green team defended their truck for a full 10 minutes and when attacking, took control of the truck and raised the flag with just 5 seconds to spare.

1-1 as the teams headed into the final game.

The final game of the afternoon was in the main paintball wood, a game called Missile Base. Teams start at opposite sides of the wood and battle to take control of the missile base and raise the flag of their team colour. A hard fought game saw stand out performance from Team Manager Matt Cornwell and the Blue team raised their flag to take victory not only of the game but also the day.