8:30am is too Early for a Basketball Game!!

Well, this weekend was the girls Texas high school state basketball championships. The format is pretty simple the Final Fours of the five classifications, Class A (the smallest division), has two divisions. So Thursday through Saturday there are six games a day starting at 8:30am and going until after 10pm. And, after three days six state champions are crowned.

This year, we had two teams qualify, Roby who went last year and lost in the first game, and Roscoe, who hadn't had a team there since in over 20 years. Both were playing in Class A, the smallest division in the state. Roscoe was in Division I, which is the "bigger" of the two divisions. Roby was in Division II, which is high schools with less than 100 kinds in the whole school. Something I could not imagine considering there were about 3,000 in my school.

Now, here is the problem with covering the smallest schools in the tournament. They get the WORST tip off times!! Roscoe was the first game of the morning on Thursday, playing at 8:30am! Luckily, we were able to go Wednesday night and "only" had to get up at 6am. I was told by one of the Roscoe fans that there was a fan bus that left for the game from Roscoe at 2:30am! Now that's a school spirit I never had for my school! Roscoe ended up winning the game, which meant their prize was another 8:30am game on Saturday... more on that later.

Roby, since they play in the smallest division gets paired up with the 5A teams, so at least they get to play a little later. That ended up being a double-edged sword. Roby played Friday afternoon at 2pm. The game was great, they struggled early and picked it up and won their game, something that was expected from a team that made it there last year and had no seniors.

Then came Saturday... the longest day. Roscoe played at 8:30am then Roby play at 7pm! The good thing was at least I wouldn't have to be worried about my deadline for the Roscoe game. I had everything done, photos sent and a 34 photo slide show for the web, all done not long after noon. And then, I had all afternoon to sit and do nothing, kinda boring. Luckily, Roby was playing in the first game of the session, so I knew the game would at least start on time. That was a good thing since we had early deadlines because of the time change and the paper had to be out at 10pm, normally, we can get photos in at 10pm and they have an hour to work on the pages.

When I shoot games like this it is really nice. This is the only thing on my mind, and I can devote all my attention to just doing this. It's also nice because the games have nice light being played in the Frank Erwin Center at the University of Texas. The other nice thing about it is being able to move around. Since there is an upper deck I always make it a point to shoot a quarter of every game from up there to get something different then the normal baseline shots. I also like to have a remote camera with a wide angle lens on it to shoot floor shots. Something different, that I can't always due, since my D2x has awful looking files over 800 ISO. My normal set up for any basketball game is my D3 with a 70-200mm f2.8 and my D2Hs with a 300mm f2.8 lens. So adding in the wide angle camera makes for a nice change. I also love the way the shots look, even these girls that don't play an "above the rim" game look huge from this angle. Overall, I was pretty happy with what I ended up with. I ended up putting up over 120 photos on the web from the four different games. I also did a gallery of my overall faves from the weekend here.