Paintball Magazine February 2019 | Page 22

Rose Griffith: Unique Sporting of Anaheim, California was owned and operated by Rose and Al Griffith (brother). In the early 90s Rose was a big player in paintball - as a manufacturer, an event sponsor and paintball ambassador, traveling to events around the U.S. supporting teams and players. Rose’s claim to fame was her very ahead-of-their time packs, which were hand sewn right in their Anaheim warehouse/retail store. Rose was involved in all of the paintball industry’s early (1990s) behind the scenes meeting where much of the game’s direction was forged. Rose has been out of the game since the late 199s but her pack designs are still being used today. Unique Sporting pack, early 1990s 022 paintball.media magazine Dawn Mills: In 1992, before the World Wide Web as we know it today existed, paintball players communicated online via a “newsgroup” known as rec.sport. paintball. Dawn and Bill Mills were contributors to the group early on and with the help of someone named Steve Mitchell, the Mills’ photos and text would be later moved to HTML pages on a server that would be accessed through warpig.cati.csufresno.edu. This became the first paintball website in the world and it would eventually be called WARPIG (www,warpig.com), which is still an online wealth of information available today. WARPIG was the go to source for breaking news, tournament results and coverage, product reviews and some of the earliest paintball videos in the game. Dawn played a huge part in WARPG success and popularity. She wrote much of the site’s content/coverage, took a majority of the photos and helped guide the site to success. Bill and Dawn can still be seen from time to time at the various national-level events and on playing fields in Florida. Bill and Dawn Mills early 2000s