The Colts, like various other teams, skipped a day of non-contact* practice for something other than football. They chose paintball. Which is hardly non-contact*.
“[The idea was] team building, camaraderie -- instead I got bunch of welts,” coach Chuck Pagano said at the season-ticket town hall meeting on Thursday night. “It was a great opportunity for our guys to get off campus, do something a little bit different.”
The exercise entailed a little more risk than going to Dave & Buster’s or driving go-karts.
“I was praying, down on my hands and knees, nobody turn an ankle,” Pagano said.
Ankles aren’t the only things at risk while playing paintball. A decade ago, Washington’s defensive backs opted for paintball as a team-building exercise. Then-rookie LaRon Landry took a paint-filled pellet to the McNuggets.
“I didn’t know paintball was that dangerous,” linebacker Marcus Washington said at the time. “I hope it wasn’t friendly fire.”
Apparently it was friendly fire that resulted in Landry suffering an injury that actually caused him to miss time at the team’s mandatory minicamp.
Here’s what PFT had to say about the situation at the time, via HogsHaven.com: “Landry had ‘shot’ one of his teammates, knocking him out of the game. Then, Landry walked up to the player, who was on the ground at the time, and proclaimed that he was going to finish him off, execution style. The teammate then raised his paintball gun and shot Landry point-blank in the crotch.”
The Colts apparently emerged from the exercise without a similar injury. Which may or may not justify the hanging of a banner.