Brett Mihelish
For the Kaimin

Elena Ruddy rushed to her favorite class Wednesday; she was late again. As she pulled into the parking lot of Paintball Montana, she noticed something was different. Her classmates weren’t sporting their typical paintball apparel.

Her one-credit Health and Human Performance class, Paintball 107, had been canceled permanently.

“I’m bummed. It was a really fun class,” said Ruddy, a freshman general studies major.

Adrienne Corti, a coordinator for Health and Human Performance activity classes, created an agency contract with the business owner of Glory Days, Craig Puccinelli, who opened Paintball Montana, a state-of-the-art indoor heated paintball facility , on Dec. 4. Together, the two created the intense 15-week course.

“The class was canceled for financial purposes,” Puccinelli said. “There was not enough revenue coming in for the facility to be maintained.”

Paintball 107 was first offered this spring semester and took a laidback approach, teaching students the rules, strategies and techniques of paintball.

The off-campus course was held every Wednesday for two hours at the Paintball Montana facility on 6600 Kestrel Court.

Corti said she had an uneasy sense that something wasn’t right when her phone calls to Puccinelli about the progress of the course went unreturned.

“He called Wednesday, one hour prior to class, to say, ‘Paintball Montana went out of business,’” Corti said.

Corti immediately jumped in her vehicle and went out to the facility to tell the students that their class was canceled.

The overall feeling of the class was disappointment, Ruddy said. Each student received a full refund for the cost of the course.

“I made sure everyone got a 100-percent return,” Puccinelli said. The off-campus class had a $300 fee attached to the one-credit cost. Puccinelli hadn’t cashed any of the student’s checks nor ran any of their credit cards for the fee, Corti said.

“Everyone bent over backwards for the students,” Corti said. Since the class was canceled, nothing will show up on the student’s transcripts, said Laura Carlyon, an associate registrar at the University of Montana.

Ruddy was glad to know she would receive a full refund, but the cancellation of the class left her in a predicament. Ruddy needs 16 credits this semester in order to live off-campus next fall. “I took bowling,” Ruddy said.

But it is the same class she took last semester.

“I didn’t want to be a month and a half behind everyone else in class,” she said.

Students are trying to accept the cancellation of the adrenaline-inducing course.

As Ruddy and her former paintball-enthused classmates walked back to their vehicles they were all bummed, she said.

“We looked forward to that class every Wednesday,” Ruddy said.

Source: http://www.kaimin.org/viewarticle.php?id=4120

awww that sucks.. i hate when cool things like that dont get to work because of money