The Man Squad

We just received our shipment of Fill the Footlocker patches! The company that made them did a fantastic job and they look great! Any Mansquad member who participates in a Fill the Foolocker drive, through donations, or helping out during the drives is eligible to wear the patch, which goes on the opposite pocket of the Mansquad patch on the uniform. These patches a FREE to members who help out with the drive.

We will have these available at the March bivouac as well as the April drives at the Jacksonville Publix locations. Contact us directly if you will not be able to make any of the above but have participated in the last drive and would like one.

Ok, I know we said we were going to bring the March bivouac back to Jacksonville, but the fact of the matter is, everything is booked solid. We even checked as far south as St. Augustine, and no dice. Not sure if it’s due to Bike Week, or some other astronomical event, but we were able to find us space in what appears to be a pretty cool and well-located state park: Rodman Campground. Rodman Campground is situated on the Rodman Reservoir, which overlooks Lake Ocklawaha. From what we can tell, it has some really nice views. The campground comes really highly rated.

For more information on the campground, click here.

We have reserved three sites (2 primitive-tent and 1 camper) for Saturday, March 19, 2011. As always, PLEASE RSVP ASAP! You can either RSVP to the Facebook event, or contact one of the HQ staff directly. It is looking like campsites are very hard to come by this time of year in Florida, so if I need to book more sites, it’s best if I have an idea of who will be going as early as possible. There is a map below that shows the location (it should be pretty centrally located for most members).

Hope to see y’all there!

We are pleased to announce the formation of the Mansquad Maniacs Paintball Team! The Maniacs are a group of Mansquad members who have recently become obsessed with, er, are really into paintball! Right now it includes just Jacksonville members, but anyone is welcome to join. We have a forum online now at http://maniacs.mansquad.com where we intend to post information about local events and paintball stuff in general. Since we know not every Mansquad member is into paintball, we chose to separate the two into separate groups, so we will be posting most local notifications to the forum (rather than the group wall on Facebook).

If you’re interested in playing some local paintball matches (outside of the normal Mansquad sanctioned quarterly events) please feel free to sign up on the forum to stay in touch for information about the small “skirmish” style events we have planned around the Jacksonville area.

The second official Mansquad paintball match is in the books, and a good time was had by all (er, well, most!). The event was held at Wayne’s World of Paintball in Ocala, Florida. Despite low attendance, we had two new members join us for the event, so welcome aboard to Jamon from Tampa and Aaron from Jacksonville!

We have decided to host Mansquad paintball as a quarterly event.

• Winter Paintball – February
• Spring Paintball – May
• Summer Paintball – August
• Fall Paintball – November

Naturally, the summer paintball will be HOT. We are going to do our best to find locations that are indoors, or attempt to schedule the event during cooler days.

Unfortunately, none of us had the foresight to take pictures of the event, so, I’ll just go ahead and document the highlights and lowlights, as usual.

Highlights

• The park was massive, and had some great scenario fields to play on
• The quality of the rental gear was much better than the previous spot
• The temperature, while still a bit warm, was significantly more comfortable than last time in Gainesville
• Dinner that night at Ipanema Brazilian Steakhouse was the stuff of legends
• We have a new member award (see below)

Lowlights

• We had 60% of our “confirmed” members cancel inside of 72 hours. Very disappointing, guys. While we realize there are always extenuating circumstances, if you feel like there is a chance that you will not be able to make the event, please mark “maybe” on the reservation. We ended up losing money due to all of the cancellations, since we had reserved the park and lunch for 12 people (we originally had 20 confirmed), and only 9 showed.
• Evidently we had the park reserved on an “Airsoft Weekend”. What this loosely translates to is hundreds of teens and their parents dressed to the nines in military garb playing Airsoft on almost every field. This made it difficult for us to get field time
• Our referee was mediocre, and we didn’t feel he was assertive enough to get us fields to play on
• We lost two players after the third game due to injury

As mentioned above, we have a new member award. Unfortunately, one of our members (Sean) was wounded in the midsts of the third game. While sliding into cover, he dislocated his left shoulder and had to go to the nearby emergency room to reset it. He was accompanied by another member (Leonard). Sean and Leonard ended up staying in the ER for most of the day, only meeting up with us for dinner later. With that in mind, we have created the “Purple Thumb” award, for a member who was injured during the course of a Mansquad event. Sean took it like a man and still ended up having an enjoyable time and a great dinner later, so, for that, we salute him, and gladly award him the first Mansquad Purple Thumb.


Next month’s bivouac will be held in the Jacksonville region. We are currently looking at Talbot Island, or, possibly, somewhere in St. Augustine. As always, we will keep everyone posted via Facebook.

This weekend, Mansquad members in Jacksonville, Florida shipped over 100 lbs. of food and supplies to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 74, stationed in Djibouti, Africa. Donations were received from all around the state of Florida, from other Mansquad members, and from local businesses.

Watch the Fill the Footlocker promotional video below to learn how you can help.