Boats & Hoes . .

Boats & Hoes paintball team was formed by a group of old friends who have been playing paintball together since 1998. The core of the team traveled and played together on the national circuit from 2000 to 2005. At the end of the 2005 season the team split up, some of the players continued playing at the professional level and others left to pursue their lives outside of paintball.

In April 2011, the idea for Boats & Hoes started brewing when after a 6 year hiatus Doug Auclair started playing again and decided that he wanted to play with all of his old friends. He sounded the conch horn (email) and put the call out to the troops to see if any of them were interested in playing some local NEPL events in the 7-man division just for the fun of playing paintball again.

The response was surprisingly overwhelming when everyone was on board almost instantly. The Boats & Hoes roster consists of Dougie “Crowsnest” Auclair, Marc “C-Town” Lancia, Tommy “2-drunk/Cop’s & Robbers” Reed, David “Nighthawk” Thibault, Tom “Dragon” Buckley, Marco “Analingus” Vitale, Dustin “Moneyshot” Fehr, Pablo “Grimey” Silvia, and of course the team medic Karson “Doc” Mui.

Boats & Hoes made their debut at the second NEPL event of the season playing 7-man D2.

Boats & Hoes started the event on a low by dropping the first game, with a long wait for the next game it gave the team time to reflect on why they were there. To have fun, it didn’t matter if they went 0-6 on the day because the whole purpose of the team’s existence was to have fun playing with friends.

The team started firing on all cylinders after the first game and went on a streak winning the next four games in a row. Boats & Hoes dropped their final game to Boston Armada in the prelims and ended up going into the semis ranked 3rd.

As luck would have it, Boston Armada went into the semis ranked 2nd and Boats & Hoes would get the rematch that they wanted. Boats & Hoes one the first game against armada fairly convincingly, the second game was a hard fought battle that ended with Armada just edging out the win. Game 3 came down to a ride or die scenario with two teams that only wanted to smash the other in the face and move onto the finals. After a serious battle Boats & Hoes came out on top earning them a trip to the finals and what looks to be a serious new rival in the division.

Boats & Hoes went on to play Synergy in the finals, unfortunately Synergy was running on all cylinders all day and ended up edging Boats & Hoes in the finals putting them into second place.

Overall the tournament was a blast and the entire Boats & Hoes team had a lot of fun taking 2nd place, which is the entire purpose of playing paintball, to have fun with your friends. Forget all the politics and BS that goes with competitive sports, when push comes to shove if you aren’t having fun then nothing else matters.

You will see Boats & Hoes at the NEPL event #3, the team will have much less rust on the gears and a few more practice games under their belt for the next event. It looks like Boats & Hoes will be a force to be reckoned with the rest of the NEPL season.

Boats & Hoes would like to thank all the players in the NEPL who made the teams first event a great time as well as Planet Eclipse for equipping the team with the best gear available.