From Airsoft Beginner To Airsoft referee

Hi everybody, my name is Simone, callsign Meyon (@meyon3 on Instagram), I'm an airsoft player from Italy and I'm proud to be sponsored by Unigear. First, let me introduce Airsoft to those who don't know what it is:

Basically, Airsoft is a "war" simulation game with several modes, The objective is usually to hit all the other players or conquer a flag. The guns we use can be electric, gas or CO2 powered and they shoot plastic spherical balls. If you get hit by one you have to call you are hit and leave the game area until the game ends. The most important rule of this sport is Fair Play, you have always to call when you get hit, if everyone does that, the community gets better.

My "story" began in the woods of north eastern Italy, in a small town. In the last days of May, my friends invited me to join them in a game of Airsoft. I always wanted play airsoft since I was young, but it's difficult to convince your parents to let you shoot other people in the forest on Sunday mornings, so I never had the opportunity until that day. I enjoyed that game very much, it was like being in a videogame, but then I discovered that it was pretty much impossible to find people who could play regularly so I thought that I would never play it again.

But something changed that day, we started asking people to join us: There were many ex-players who lived near to my home town whom we asked to join us. They still have guns and gear but stopped playing for different reasons. Enough of them did join us on Sundays so that we had a decent number to play, we could even find each other's 2/3 times a month.

Everyone started buying their own guns and gear instead of borrowing them. But there was a problem, even if we played in places owned by our team mates or granted by the owners to us, we had no insurances or other legal requirements.

More people were coming, and we started thinking to restore the team our team mates once had. The problem was that many people came too infrequently to do that.

Then one Sunday, one of our friends told us that he was playing with his team near our places and asked us if we wanted to join them., so we went to the old quarry which was their playground and the "rookies" in our group discovered a new way to play airsoft.

Their guns were customized to be as much powerful as the law allows and they shot 3 or 4 times faster than our 100€ guns, their movements were smoother than ours, they had a proper way to play it.

We tried our best to not look like complete newbies but many of us failed (😀), the old players were used to this game-style but they didn't warned us that what we played for the last months wasn't airsoft at all. Nevertheless, a couple of weeks later, the leader of that team invited us to join them, The ones who wanted to start this new adventure joined the team where we all play right now, called Friul Corps, the others who wanted to play more occasionally didn't came, but we still ask them to play like we did in the beginning when our team doesn't organizes anything on sundays.

At this point of the story, I decided to share my experience with my friends on Instagram, posting some pictures of our games. My friends started asking me questions about it and asked if they could join us sometimes. I decided so that I wanted to work hard to improve my profile, started posting better pictures and more often, started gaining the new audience and looking for some partners for this adventure.

We started partecipating in different tournaments, near or far away from home, having good results in that.

The more I played, the more I wanted to play again, to be part of this world, so I took the exam to became Airsoft referee for official Airsoft Championship and I passed the test. Then, a couple of weeks later, I did my job as a referee in the first local championship match of the season, which went quite well.

I started meeting more and more people, talking with players from other local and international team, sharing opinions, thoughts and tips, I was even invited to join some other teams as I did some pretty good actions in the game but most importantly, I got asked to play with other teams on Sundays. As long as I were free from my team training sessions, I went to other fields to learn how other teams play, and to meet more and more people again.

One of my friends offered to took some photos, we started working on photoshots, and we were pretty happy to see that people enjoyed them as much as we enjoyed doing them, I got some comments on my pictures and lots of positive and encouraging messages from my fans.

In the end, a couple of weeks ago, the father of a 16-year-old player asked me to help him with his project: it is basically an airsoft school for young players from 14 to 17 years, where they get in touch with the airsoft world; as soon as they hit 18 they are free to join a major team. Two of their members have already joined us, and by training them and show them what my team has taught me, I hope more will join us too.

So this is pretty much my first year in Airsoft. In writing this article I have come to realize how much I’ve improved in just one year. I’ve also discovered how much work I still have to do to become a very good airsoft player.

Hope you enjoyed my story, see you next time!

-Meyon

By Simone Maion

Simone Maion is an airsoft player from Italy

@meyon3 

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