INTRO - HISTORY OF THE
MOUNDS FIELDS
In its fourth season after the league’s inception
in 1993/1994, the National Professional
Paintball League (NPPL) introduced a new
location to its yearly five-event pro/am
paintball tour. The field was Urban Assault in
McDonald, Pennsylvania, about half an hour
from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Like all other
NPPL event fields in 1996 Urban Assault had
plenty of woods for setting up the ten-man
fields. But with the help of Smart Parts (NPPL
partners and promoters at the time) a new
open field concept was introduced which
would later be best known as “the mounds
fields.”
The mounds fields were very different to play
as this was at a time when all other ten-man
tournament ball was played in the woods.
The mounds fields were designed with each
team’s half of the field a mirror image of the
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other, which of course became the standard
later in 1996 when Chicago Badlandz
introduced Hyperball and Adrenaline
Games/Millennium Series rolled out airball
fields, also in 1996.
In the four years that the NPPL played at
Urban Assault (1996, 1997, 1998, 2000) two
mounds fields were used—along with several
woodsball fields. It’s historically significant to
note that the mounds fields were introduced
before Hyperball and airball as mentioned
above—so they were the first ten-man
open-concept fields used in the U.S. The
mounds fields were also trendsetting in
that spectators were finally able to watch
professional paintball games from literally
inches from the playing fields. And just a year
later open concept fields and spectating
became the norm as it still is today.
Considering its history, I’m not at all surprised
that interest in playing the mounds fields was