I keep throwing around this big word: Unity, but what does it mean? What on earth does unity have to do with a paintball team? Unity is Confidence. Unity is Chemistry. Unity is Knowledge. Unity is the three of these working together to bring the team’s overall performance up to a higher and more enjoyable level.
Unity is the summation of a team’s confidence, chemistry and knowledge, in other words, their mental attributes. Unity is then added to Strength, which is the physical attributes assigned to a particular position. Strength is made up of armament, strategy and speed. These two groupings are paired as follows:

• Strength/Unity
• Armament/Confidence
• Strategy/Knowledge
• Speed/Chemistry

What a commander is looking for isn’t necessarily the highest of each of the attributes, but a high unity and a high strength. A team may have practically no armament, no strategy and be agonizingly slow on the field, but if the team’s unity is good enough, then this won’t be a problem.
Before we go further, let’s look into each of the pairs.

Armament/Confidence Pair
The Armament/Confidence Pair (A/C) measures how strong your team’s weaponry and how secure your team is in their abilities with that equipment, their knowledge and their squad mates. A confident team will automatically be much better off on the field than a team with little confidence because they will be able to pull off things in a pinch.
The main reason that these two are put together is because when a team has better equipment and they know it, they are more willing to take advantage of situations that can better use that equipment to its full potential.
Conversely, a team that is confident in weaker equipment, say a team equipped with Tippmann markers and have been using them for a while, will be able to pull the same things off as a team who’s equipment gives them confidence.
Overall, the team with more armament may become too confident and lose out because they miss basic strategic things because they can’t, or won’t, see the simple things in front of them because they’ve got a really good gear kit. This is when confidence becomes ego. Nip an ego in the bud before it breaks up the team.
One more thing here is that a team who’s confidence stems from their knowledge and their chemistry will be able to overpower a team that has just confidence in its equipment. The confidence of knowledge and chemistry is by far better for a team than merely their equipment. Put all three together and you’re amazing.

Strategy/Knowledge Pair
The Strategy/Knowledge Pair (S/K) measures the levels of strategy that a team employs and how much the team as a whole knows about paintball equipment, their teammates, commander and the field. A knowledgeable team has the advantage of anticipation over another team, especially a team that is able to identify things without seeing them completely or just by sound. A team with a lot of strategy also has an advantage because they are able to create tactics on the spot and implement them with little to no argument.
Teams with higher Strategy/Knowledge tend to be crafty and smart. These teams run circles around other teams just by the way that they move and act. Strategy and Knowledge work together by their ability to produce specialized knowledge.
Completely strategic teams lack often the technical knowledge to pinpoint where their plans should be enacted and when. Usually, this is because the team as a whole just hasn’t been playing for long enough to gain a field knowledge of different equipment. Take heart, this generally goes away after a year or so.
However, mostly knowledgeable teams have spent so much time researching and learning that they have no experience grounded in the cold hard facts of the field. Also, in fighting may occur over who knows the most about what and who should be doing the leading. This makes the team weaker as a whole because they are arguing, and lowers their chemistry and speed. Also, this kind of fighting damages confidence in the team or their armament because it has been called “weak” or “outdated” by another member of the team.
This pair tends to be what drags most teams apart because the arguments are easy to start and hard to end here. However, if a team is able to avoid this, usually through an exceptional commander who can smooth technical and strategic arguments out, their combined strategy and knowledge can overcome most on field situations with a gleeful ease about them.

Speed/Chemistry Pair
Speed/Chemistry (S/C) is the pair that is the most confusing, but contains the most power and needs the most work. Speed is obvious. How fast a team moves and how fast they execute orders given by the command unit. Chemistry is the overall interactions between the players on and off the field. These two work together by a team’s innate Chemistry to be able to push a team’s orders faster and faster because there is little explanation or communication involved. If a team can naturally follow orders, and the orders given lead to successful or enjoyable experiences, Chemistry naturally develops through the enjoyment of the game.
Speed/Chemistry teams are blurs on the field, doing things practically without any vocal, physical or radio communication and have almost a sixth sense about their teammates. They seem like phantoms and are hard to keep track of or predict because of their fluidity.
The bad part of being fast? You get sloppy. Mistakes become gaping holes in the best laid plans and they can fall apart if the team pushes too far too fast. This leads to claims of abandonment and desertion that can’t do anything but tear apart a team’s chemistry, hurting their confidence because they lose trust in their teammates.
Having too much Chemistry can hurt too. A team may get too chatty and not be able to accomplish anything because they’re joking all the time, or they blow all their precious money hanging out together before they get on the field. Either way, both hurt your team on the field.
This pair helps improve the others the fastest because of its importance. A team that the members feel more than just a broadsword on and more like a band of brothers, save the cliché, the more confident they are and willing to invest time to improve their Knowledge, Strategy and buy better Armament.

Now, after all of that, remember that all teams fall along these pairs closer to one end or the other. A team can be higher in Armament than Confidence, in Knowledge than Strategy and Chemistry than Speed. It’s not bad to be really close to one end than the other, but being too far to one end tends to erupt into problems from the particulars mentioned above.
As we said before, a commander is looking to foster a balance between Strength and Unity, not the individual attributes. A team should be as strong as it is unified. It actually can’t be any stronger than it is unified. Just how it works.
Why you want a balance between the two is that a team with balance lasts and becomes valuable. This is the way that teams move beyond just being walk-on scenario teams and literal monsters that people avoid whenever possible, though that team usually catches up.
This balance is delicate, and struck only through working on the pairs through the time that the team exists. Working gradually with these brings them into balance and that balance must be maintained, and never feel like it is being forced onto the team. The worst thing for any of these pairs is for them to be forced.
Ultimately, the better a team’s balance between Unity and Strength, the better off the team will be in the long run. This is because the team will be able to perform and be able to rely on each other and their equipment, and not be afraid. At all. That, is how woods ball is won