Any good Airsoft Team has some sort of structure to their presence on the playing field. Working as a team, supporting each other, and creating an outcome that's bigger than the sum of the individual players is the core goal for any team, and is what separates them from just a group of people who hang out together on breaks between the games.
Working out how to manage a large group of people, all while the BBs are flying and people are taking hits all over the place, can be a daunting task. Sometimes, it can feel like trying to herd cats, especially early on before people settle into the rhythm of your team.
So let's have an overview of what makes an Airsoft Team, both on and off the field. We'll cover:
1. Individual team member roles.
2. Grouping your team members up sensibly.
3. Coordinating those groups together into a team effort.
Individual Roles
At the lowest level is the individual: one player and their airsoft gun. That player needs to know where they sit in the team and whether they have any special roles.
The most basic role is a rifleman, armed with your standard airsoft gun and tasked with engaging the enemy in front of them, making a push forward if necessary or covering a defensive position if necessary. Flexible and simple, rifleman gameplay is something everyone who plays airsoft is familiar with, because it's what everyone plays if they're running solo.
Airsoft teams, though, have the space and coordination to very effectively introduce some specialist roles that, when working together with their rifleman buddies, can be deadly on the field.
Take, for example, a player armed with an LMG-type weapon: box magazines make them able to put out a massive rate of fire, but LMGs are normally larger, heavier, and less agile than a short rifle would be. These players might do well setting themselves up behind your rifleman and putting loads of BBs onto the enemy, letting your riflemen close in for the kill while the enemy struggles to react under a storm of BBs. (Check out our article on Suppressive Fire to really maximise the effect an LMG player can have on your ability to push those objectives!)
A player armed with a scoped rifle, be it a DMR or fully-fledged sniper rifle, can also slot in nicely to a team environment. Their scope can help them pick out enemies from afar, allowing them to communicate these positions to the wider team, and their ability to place pinpoint shots at much longer ranges can break up an enemy attack, or home in on particularly dangerous enemy players: picking off their own LMG gunners or locking down an objective, picking off anyone who tries to make a play for it, allowing the rest of your team to focus on wiping out enemy players.
Specialist roles can go beyond what weapon you carry, though.
Having someone designated as medic (for games with rules allowing medics to revive hit players) will simplify dealing with casualties: if one of your team gets hit, everyone immediately knows who's going to respond to that and get them back in the fight, meaning no time is lost in trying to work out who should try to medic your team mates back in, and everyone knows who to cover when they're moving up to medic someone.
Having a couple of players designated as left and right flank protection means your team can guarantee someone's always watching your flanks, making it less likely that enemy ghillie or enemy flanking move will catch you by surprise: if someone's always keeping an eye to the side, your enemy have much less scope to try to work your flanks to their advantage.
Most importantly, is having someone designated as the team leader! This does not have to be the same person every time: many teams will take turns letting one member run the squad for a game, then rotating to someone else for the next game, while other teams might have someone everyone's comfortable with being in command and they'll do it all or most times. It's important to pick a way that keeps your members happy.
Having a leader is important because the team needs to be coordinated and always rowing in the same direction. This requires someone who is given the authority to set that direction: someone who'll decide whether it's time to make a push, or to fall back, or to try a flanking move, or anything else. If no one is in charge, different people with different ideas will end up either competing for attention or implementing their own ideas, and your team will no longer have a single focus.
Team Groupings
Once everyone's got an idea of what individual role they're happiest playing, the time has come to start creating groups of your players. Having half a dozen or more people running around in one big group will start to impose challenges managing them all effectively, and will make it difficult to pull off more complex (but more effective) tactics in the heat of battle. (A selection of effective tactics for your team can be found here.)
Ideally, you'll be dividing your players up into sub-groups of two to four players in each squad. Having a few of these ready-made groups gives you lots of flexibility, letting you quickly divide your team into roles mid-battle: one team holds the line while another flanks, for example, or one team gives covering fire while the other tries to push up and grab that objective. It's much easier to say "squad 1 can do this, squad 2 can do that!" mid-fight than it is to rattle off 6+ names!
Slotting your players into these squads depends on how you want to run your team in the field. Do you want all your LMG and Sniper players in a heavy weapons squad that you can deploy to lay waste to whatever you point them at, and all your rifle players in another squad that will be very nimble and quick to move around, creating an assault team for making those pushes? Or do you want to make a few decent all-rounder squads with some heavy and some light weapons so every squad is able to tackle every problem with a reasonable shot at success?
Personal links can play a part here: some players want to stick to particular friends or friend groups, and so might want to be in the same squad. Some players might not want to be hard pushers, and wouldn't be happy in a squad being used to push the objectives all the time. This part is as much about the person as it is about the player.
The Team Effort
So you've got your players all knowing their individual part they play in your team, you've got them split into squads that will work together to win games for your side. What's left?
Coordination.
Having a good Team Leader is vital, otherwise your squads will fragment, get separated, and your team won't be as effective as it could be because all your efforts are going towards the same objective.
This isn't the time for a power trip, for someone to boss everyone around and think they're better than the rest of the team.
Team Leader is a job just like being a medic, or a support gunner. Everyone else in the team trusts that person to keep an eye on the bigger picture, to keep an eye on the state of the game, and to weigh that information to decide where the team should go and how it should tackle the objectives of the game.
The role is best given to someone who is confident and who can throw together plans quickly. There's nothing worse than being in the thick of fighting, with the enemy pushing you hard, and no one having any idea how to react. Before you know it, you're all overrun and walking back to respawn.
Even a bad plan, if executed with speed and aggression, can work if everyone does their part and gets stuck into it. Even if it fails, it's a great feeling knowing you went down swinging, doing your best to foil the enemy attack, rather than just getting picked off one by one with no plan and no hope of recovery.
Conclusion
A great Airsoft team has three parts: it has players who all know what they need to do, it has organisation that allows flexibility and tactics to be used, and it has someone coordinating the effort to point the whole team towards the same objective, maximising individual contributions into one slick team effort.
If you can get your team, squad, friend group, or whoever else you play airsoft with to master these three aspects, your team will be far deadlier as a group than you'd be as just a group of people shooting in the same direction.
Comments