Are you ready for some ... paintball?

About the time he was becoming extremely curious about the extreme sport of professional paintball, Brad McCurley wrote a research report on it for middle school.

He told about the Chicago Aftershock. He wrote about Rennick Miller, owner of the pro team. He tried painting a picture of paintball, so to speak.

"I had totally (forgotten) that I did that," McCurley says. "I was going through my room and I found it. I was like, 'No way.' "

McCurley is sitting in his parents' home wearing a Lake Zurich High School soccer T-shirt and shorts, and while the senior is a starting forward/midfielder for the once-beaten Bears, the conversation is about the other sport he's passionate about. He's explaining everything you'd want to know about the game of paintball and articulating himself so well that you'd think he could market the sport, if he wasn't playing it every weekend.

Displayed on the living room floor is thousands of dollars worth of paintball gear, including a gun that sprays marble-sized paintballs at about 200 miles per hour, or roughly 300 feet per second.

"You'll feel it," McCurley says of getting pelted by paint. "It'll leave a nice welt on you."

When it comes to avoiding being shot, McCurley is a pro. Quite literally, in fact.

And all that gear that he wears on the playing field? The padded pants, elbow pads and mask with a high-tech lens. The jersey that stylishly has "BRAD" (vertically displayed) and "McCURLEY" spelled on the back?

The gun, which alone costs about $1,200?

Rennick Miller, the Chicago Aftershock and sponsors pick up the tab on all of it. All the stuff is property of Brad McCurley. Free. The team even pays the airfare to fly McCurley and the rest of his teammates all over the country for tournaments.

McCurley, who turns 18 this month, "turned pro" in July. He's the youngest player in both the National Professional Paintball League and Paintball Sports Promotions, which he says are the two big pro paintball circuits in the country. He shoots for the Aftershock, which competes in both leagues.

He's an absolute bargain, as he earns no salary. He's under no contract.

But so what.

"I get to do what I love doing for free," McCurley says. "Paintball's an expensive sport - extremely expensive."

It's an extreme sport, after all.

It's played either 5-on-5 or 7-on-7 in an enclosed field that features bunkers called Doritos. The object of the game is to eliminate the opposing players (get one paintball splattered on you and you're out), secure a flag in the middle of the field and hang it on the opponent's side without getting shot. Teams play 15-minute halves with a running clock.

"You want to advance upfield as much as possible to cut down the shooting angles of the other team," McCurley says. "It's all about angles and locking down lanes. It's actually a lot more complicated than you would think - (more than) guys just going out there and running around. It's just like a lot of sports. You have plays, like in football. It's real intense."

Initially, it was just fun for McCurley. He'd go play paintball in the woods with his soccer teammate Brett Harper's older brother Colin. Brett would play too.

"I developed this passion for it," McCurley says. "I really enjoyed what I was doing. I wanted to get more involved with it."

If you like to spray paintballs at guys, you go to Badlandz, an outdoor field in Crete that McCurley calls "the big paintball scene." That's what McCurley did and before long, the athletic, 5-foot-7 kid from Lake Zurich was being noticed.

In the winter of 2006, a Division III team called AeroSpark asked McCurley to play, and the following spring he suited up for a tournament in Los Angeles.

He played in a tourney in North Carolina and then the Chicago Open in Bolingbrook. He was eventually recruited by a Division II team called Shock-Kidz, a feeder team to Aftershock.

"Just basically through that and then playing at Badlandz every single weekend, I got noticed by some of the professional players," McCurley says. "I kind of befriended a lot of them and quickly earned my respect as a player on the field."

Eventually, Aftershock asked McCurley to join them for a tournament in Buffalo, NY., where in July he made his pro debut in an NPPL event.

Mind you, he had just finished his junior year of high school.

"I just think it's amazing," Melinda Miller says of her son. "It's been a dream of his. I've watched him just be so passionate about the sport - running down the hall with his first paintball gun."

McCurley's speed, agility, smarts and gun skills have made him pro-paintball material. "Great field vision" is something he possesses on both the paintball and soccer fields, says his stepfather, Ken Miller. McCurley plays the "snake" position for Aftershock.

"It's usually like the down-and-dirty job," McCurley explains. "You get up there right in the action. It's usually the most exciting position to watch because that's where a lot of games are won and lost.

"It takes a lot of intelligence," he adds of what it takes to be successful in paintball. "If you're not a smart player, you won't go anywhere. So much of it comes down to instincts and just using your brain."

"He's probably one of the best players on the field, always," Brett Harper says. "He's always making really good decisions on the field."

Another one of McCurley's soccer teammates, Jake Schauer, was in California this summer and watched the paintball gun-toting McCurley in action.

"It's really intense," Schauer says. "I just like watching Brad shooting everyone."

An A-B student, McCurley aims high when it comes to his goals. While he's actually signed some autographs, he's trying not to get caught up in the reality that he's a pro athlete. He's thinking about studying marketing in college, possibly at Illinois State, which is only about an hour's drive from Badlandz.

The next target for the teenage pro paintballer is the Paintball World Cup, which takes place Oct. 22-26 at Disney's Wide World of Sports in Florida.

In the meantime, he heals from an ankle injury that has kept him off the soccer field and focuses on school.

"It definitely affects my schoolwork," McCurley says of his paintball commitments. "But, I mean, it's all preparation for the real world I guess - being able to juggle multiple things. This has actually matured me a lot."

It all started with him taking a shot.