State Golf & Tennis, Day 1

I'm behind again, I shot this the beginning of last week. The state golf tennis and track meets are one of my favorite things to cover every year. It's one of the longest weeks of the year, but always a lot of fun and usually plenty of nice photos to be made.

This year because of the swine flu overreaction, the track meet was postponed until the first week in June. Which is going to be tons of fun! Austin in early May is hotter than hell, with humidity similar to Atlanta in mid-summer (the only thing I DON'T miss about living in the South), needless to say June is even worse. This also meant the yearly trip to Austin was abbreviated to only two days.

Every year, this trip is the ultimate test of my time-management skills, as well as how little sleep I can work on. The day starts at 4am, that's when I leave for Austin. My first trip is to the golf course to shoot golf, I get them teeing off and spend a couple hours following the area kids around before moving on to tennis. The last couple of years we've had local players in the 5A tournament and as well a slew of kids in the 2A and 3A tournaments. The problem here is the are played in two different places, and one of those places is Lakeway, which is about 15-20 miles from downtown Austin, which in Austin traffic translates into a 40 minute drive. Since there are two rounds of tennis played on the first day I always hit the local kids in the big school matches first since there is one, or this year two groups in the tournament.

The reason I wait to shoot the smaller schools until later is part because there are so many kids to cover which means the chances of some making it to the next round are pretty good, plus the matches at Lakeway ARE NEVER ON TIME!!! So, matches running 2-3 hours behind are usually the norm even without weather delays. I guess this is good since I know even if I'm running late that I'll get most of the kids playing in the later rounds, it also means even though the sun doesn't go down till 8pm you can still get shots of that while they are playing, and since there wasn't a whole lot of great shots made, I could have something decent to send back.