Kendallz Extreme Sports: Aiming to elevate the Guyanese Paintball Experience

Dec 07, 2020 News

By Sueann Wickham

Kaieteur News – With paintballing recently becoming one of Guyana’s most interesting sporting activities, Kendallz Extreme Sports has been the body making it the new talk of the town.
Making waves on social media in recent months, the company has been providing customers with an excellent getaway retreat that provides them with a balance of recreation and extreme sporting.
Kevin Heinz, a 32-year-old Guyanese entrepreneur, is the pioneer of the company and has always had a passion for turning paintballing into a local sport that is also on par with international standards.

A live capture of the forest paintballing.

Heinz officially started his company in April 2011, when he returned to Guyana after living in the United States for several years and kick-started his works in the paintballing arena.
In his interview with Kaieteur News, he stated that he first began by procuring paintballing equipment which later evolved into him providing the paintballing experience locally.
He established his first location in Georgetown, where persons could play paintball in small groups with a given time slot. This catered for mostly corporate events to help companies exercise event planning skills and internal training. It functioned for years and was well received by those entities, but Heinz felt the need to expand further, which is when he came up with the idea of creating an out of town campsite to take paintballing to the “next level”.
That campsite which has been making waves allowed persons to play paintball in a forested area, increasing competitiveness and the liveliness of the activity. But it was still catering for corporate events, Heinz said.
That campsite allowed the company to provide services to the Guyana Defence Force who used it as a training experience for their troops as well as many organizations and bodies.
Only a year ago Heinz decided to focus on the recreational aspect of the paintballing experience which led to him opening up the campsite to families and other groups of persons looking for a getaway from the hassles of life and engage in competitive but recreational paintballing.
The campsite, Heinz said, is around 60 acres, and allows for not only paintballing but other activities like volleyball, cricket, obstacle courses and even a campfire setting where persons can bush cook and relax if they do not wish to engage in the paintballing. “We have made it more than a one-size fit. Sometimes families will go and not everyone wants to play paintball so we made sure there were things to keep everyone occupied,” he shared.
He described it as the perfect family retreat where persons can engage in all-day activities and be extremely satisfied with the service being offered.
The campsite also has little to no cellular service, bolstering social engagement and cuts persons off from the “outside world”.
He noted that his biggest challenge was raising the awareness of paintballing locally, as many Guyanese never saw it as a real sport. This pushed him to work assiduously to have it registered as an official sport in Guyana, however, to date he is still trying to have the regular authorities do so.
Despite this, his long term goal is to not only have it recognized as an official sport locally, but he would also like to see the competitive scale being lifted by hosting tournaments locally and have properly trained paintball players representing Guyana internationally.
Heinz has already begun talks with regional paintball service providers and he noted that he also has affiliates as far as Dubai hoping to assist in elevating the sport even further in Guyana.
He believes that what he pioneered can contribute to a boost in local tourism and light of that he will be adding much more to Kendallz Extreme Sports’ portfolio. According to Heinz, they will soon introduce a canopy zipline which will be the first in Guyana, an indoor skydiving facility and they will also be establishing new campsites in Linden and Bartica to ensure more Guyanese access their services.
As he awaits his grant to provide an even wider array of services he is positive he can make a mark in the local sports arena and will continue at aiming to provide top tier services to the citizens of Guyana.
Persons who wish to secure Kendallz Extreme Sports’ services can access additional information on social media platforms by searching their handle kendallzextremesportsgy.