COMPETITION MAKES BIG SPLASH.

Byline: Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - The rat-tat-tat of air rifles could be heard echoing through the hallways, courtyards and guest rooms at the Clarion Hotel (previously the DoubleTree Hotel) on Friday as the soon-to-be-demolished Springfield lodging house was converted into a paintball gaming arena.

"It was nuts in there," said a paint-splattered Ryan Lee, 23, of Eugene. "Not getting shot was the hardest part."

By midday Friday, exit signs were marked with blue, yellow, orange and pink slime, the carpets were littered with loose paintball pellets and a coffee shop had been turned into a makeshift shooting range.

"It was a lot more open, and there were a lot more people in the game," said Todd Chitwood, 17, who played in the first round and donned an orange "Ref" shirt for the second round.

"It's just like an all-out war," he said.

A mix of capture-the-flag type games were played on Friday and scheduled to continue today and Sunday in the 200,000-square-foot hotel. Players wearing camouflage fatigues and face masks toted rapid-fire guns (`markers' in paintball speak), ducked in and out of bedrooms and hid behind walls where ice machines and luggage carts once rested.

"There will be a nice colorful array of paint splats up and down these halls," said Curt Williams, owner of the indoor arena, the Paintball Palace, which organized the games.

Dubbed "Urban Paintball," the weekend gathering was billed as "a once in a lifetime" event.

The spectacle drew a mostly male, mostly under 30 crowd of paintball players who paid a $20 entry fee, plus the cost of ammunition.

"It doesn't get any better than this," said Varian Mattingly, 22, of Morgantown, W. Va. "It felt like Baghdad in there."

Williams, who calls paintball "a glorified snowball fight," ran through a long list of safety precautions before an afternoon session began on Friday that included reminding players to report potential hazards. The rooms had been swept free of dangerous debris ahead of time, and players were told not to intentionally destroy the hotel, which is slated to be leveled in mid-May to make way for a retail complex.

Tim Hovet, vice president for Sycan Development, the group that owns the property, said the weekend-long paintball event came about after a member of his church approached him with the idea.

"It just seemed like a fun thing to have happen," Hovet said. "Some of these guys take (paintball) pretty seriously."

While the paintball players were shooting up what remained of the southern wing of the hotel, a more realistic form of combat was happening next door. The Springfield Police Department was conducting training exercises in the northern wing of the hotel.

URBAN PAINTBALL

Matches run through Sunday at the Clarion Hotel, 3280 Gateway St., Springfield. For more information, call 465-4766 or go to www.urbanpaintball.net.

CAPTION(S):

Todd Chitwood and dozens of other paintball enthusiasts roamed the darkened hallways of the former Clarion Hotel in Springfield on Friday during the first day of a weekend competition designed to take advantage of the structure before it is demolished to build a retail complex.