About a Jerk
01 · The word
A jerk is a bard. A human who can do genuinely complex things — tune a blaster to the foot-per-second, calm a horse, hold a crowd — while having, if we're honest, no real idea what any of us are or how we got here. Bards made peace with that a long time ago: you enjoy your time here, and you make it better for the people around you.
And like the bards of old — or the ones in your favourite fantasy — we carry a lot more than the entertainment. Songs, yes. But also the tools, the gear, the trades, and the know-how to get a party out of trouble. In every good story, the bard is the one who makes the whole party better. We are extremely aware of the pun. It's the business plan.
02 · The club
ALBERTAJERKS is a foam dart blaster club, and the club arranges tournaments. We run our own circuit — open brackets around Greater Edmonton that anyone can enter — and we run private brackets for people who book us: offsites, birthdays, stags. The machinery behind both is a family with a tuned and chrono-tested foam-dart fleet, a foam melee armoury of swords and shields, a truck, a trailer, and a shop that fabricates whatever a bracket turns out to need. The family also happens to include working musicians and animals from bunnies all the way up to horses — foam is the point now, but the wagon still carries all of it. This is the entire supply chain. There are no shareholders. There is barely a chair.
03 · Who shows up
The company roster. Names withheld, roles disclosed — you will meet everyone at the event.
- ▸ THE FOUNDER — builds and tunes the arsenal, runs the bracket, runs the safety brief with unsettling sincerity. His favourite thing on earth is a tournament where everyone is having fun and someone just discovered the slackline.
- ▸ THE HANDLER — speaks for the animals, bunnies through horses. The animals agree.
- ▸ THE BAND — actual working musicians. Own gear, own transport, own haircuts. Volume calibrated to occasion.
- ▸ THE CREW — family. Builds the arena, referees the rounds, recovers the darts, returns your venue to its previous condition.
04 · The look
Yes, we dress like a heavy-industry outfit — hazard stripes, division numbers, safety directives. It makes us laugh, and it turns out to be honest advertising: the fun is playful, but the way we run an event is genuinely industrial-grade. The stripes are the joke. The planning, the safety, and the cleanup are played completely straight.
05 · The fine print
- ▸ Greater Edmonton Area, for now. We travel — and the horses are surprisingly good sports about it.
- ▸Nothing here looks like a real firearm — blocky, bright, obviously a toy, which is exactly what Canadian replica rules ask of the whole blaster. Muzzle tips stay orange anyway; that one's a house rule.
- ▸ Rated eye protection (ANSI Z87.1 / CSA Z94.3), always. The universe is indifferent; darts are not.
- ▸ Family run, family staffed. The whole roster shows up. That is the white-glove part.