About Me

My name is Erik and I first picked up a paintball gun at the age of 14, back in 1985. It was a brand spanking new Splatmaster, fresh out of the box! I had a whopping 40 paintballs (that's 4 ten round tubes) to last me the day. Of all my friends who went out that day, about 8 of us, 4 of us kept on playing and hooked up with a local team from the Yuba-Sutter area called the Colonial Marines. We played for years up in the woods on some private land hidden in the Sierra Nevadas, up near Grass Valley and Brownsville in Northern California. My first gun that I can say was actually mine was a bolt action Sheridan rifle. Yes, bolt action. I still remember those Uvex goggles - they were the same ones we were using in my High School biology class.

Several years later I found myself as that guy. Like you, I was the one that got the bug and kept i playing after my friends all got into whatever was next. I was the one who made paintball their life and who had it in their blood. I've played on the East Coast outside Leesberg with The LRRP, who were at one time world champions when we all shot pumps. I've played in Europe and was a member of the US Armys paintball team who not only took on other branches, but even played in the European Championships as Pros. After the Army I came back to the West Coast and my home in California, where paintball was taking off like a rocket! Using what I had at the time, my skills on a computer, I put a lot of my time and effort into launching and then running a web site called SacPaintball.Com (or as it's known now as Ballers Cafe). It was my contribution to the community, and now years later I'm glad to see it's still going strong. I was happy to hear Junior Brown acquired it and now the entire XSV crew is backing it.

During that time, I balled all over NorCal, from WAP to Xtreme Paintball, to SCP, and at so many fields that are no longer around (RIP. OP, BearCreek, Enemy, Fairgrounds, PB Sams). I was lucky enough, and honored, to have played along side, and seen come up a lot of the top pro players today. From Dave Baines to Jason Barret to Zach Long to Rich Telford to Ryan Podesta, they all call NorCal home, and it helped make the scene here intense. Heck, still to this day we have close to 1/2 a dozen Pro teams alone that call NorCal home. With that said, sadly the last national event I played in was the PSP LA Open in 2006 with a team called Old School Hustle, sadly right before the teams sponsor, Operation Paintball (aka Diggers), in Hayward CA folded.

Anyhow, in 2006 I was at WAP outside Vacaville and saw a strange new marker. It was called a Quest, and I would later find out was from a company called First Endeavor Paintball, or FEP, and who one of the founders was an old friend of mine. I soon picked one up and have been shooting one ever since. In 2007 FEP folded, with most of the founders quitting the company and moving away. In 2008, I got involved with a friend of mine, the legendary YDNA, and we came up with some after market parts for the Quest. At the time I just happened to be living in Santa Barbara, about 20 minutes away from a field called Urban Quest, owned by Dave Palmer, who was also the CEO of FEP. After showing him some of the work and ideas we had put toether, he approached me about relaunching FEP with him.

Our plans to relaunch in 2009 got scrapped, and along the way we lost Dave Palmer to other endeavors. But that's all part of the growing process. We have reformed and replanned, and we are still coming out with our new gun, new barrel kits and new Quest bolt engines. 2010 will be the year for Thin Air Sports and Thin Air Paintball. Keep an eye out.