i picked up tf2 when i heard there were 9 different classes with weird unique abilities sometime during the early beta and was getting sick of playing 1.6
i played a lot in the LUE/tf2f/[-Q-] dustbowl servers and a lot of my friends in the LUE group asked me to PUG a lot, and i mained sniper. i realized a lot of the people i played with were competitive players like apoc/emperor/pokey/leg and their crew plus some random people like wizard (experiment) and drgeorge (doctors) would always drop by the pubs i'd play in and i'd go into tryhard pubstar mode because i've heard about these guys before. i already went to gotfrag for 1.6, so i always followed comp tf2, especially when people who usually pugged with me were involved in competitive tf2 anyways.
i got asked to play on a team called 2shot and lasted one day because they didn't tell me i was going to be playing medic when the only class i played was sniper. it had dl/dumah/buddha/zambino on it and i got dropped after a single day because i dropped uber at the start of cp_dustbowl (first time playing medic LOL). i ended up just playing as a sniper main in 6v6 for cevo until all of my friends stopped playing and i ended up in tf2gather where people yelled at me until i started playing scout (because i rolled out to middle as sniper on granary, WHICH WORKED BTW). i got onto an IM team and failed really horribly because i didn't understand the importance of cap time and didn't comm at all (plus i think the first day i was on it was when we had a match), and the team ended up disintegrating after a single game and i've been hopping onto friends teams ever since
i guess only the first two paragraphs really related to the topic but i had to keep going for nostalgic purposes