First Stop on the Way to Williamsport...

Shooting bad baseball is not fun, shooting good baseball that means something is one of my favorite sports to shoot. Luckily, during the regular season we're too busy with high school and college baseball to shoot little league. However, during the summer there are no high school and college sports going on, but there are still the district and state little league tournaments. Both of witch have some type of stop in Abilene. The first one is the district 5 tournament. The good thing about it is every team in it is from Abilene or somewhere in the area, the bad thing is... well...the same thing.

Since there wasn't a whole lot going on that night I figured I'd shoot two games one was two local teams, the other a pair of area teams playing right across the street after the first one. The second game was kind of awful, I had gotten there a little late because the first one went long. It was a totally one-sided game. Errors, bad swings, mental mistakes etc. they couldn't do anything. The other team was hitting everything. I didn't end up staying long since I had a few shots and luckily was pushing up to deadline anyway.

The first game between Dixie and Cedar Creek, both from Abilene, was a great game. Cedar Creek was up 4-0 when I got there and I thought it could be a blowout, then Dixie's bats woke up and they took a lead going into the final inning. Down by 2, Cedar Creek tied it up and had runners on first and third with two outs. Then the Cedar Creek batter cranked a huge hit for a three-run homer to win the game. It's one of those things every kid dreams of doing. It made for some really nice shots, from both teams. The only bad part of the game was probably my favorite shot was from a Dixie player coming home after an earlier home run.

The Kids of Summer...

Nothing better than getting up early on a Saturday morning. Anybody who knows me knows I value my sleep. So, needless to say I was less than thrilled to be getting up early to shoot last Saturday. However, the good thing about it is the light is really nice at this time. So, I took advantage of what I was given. A lot of the Little League organizations around here do an opening ceremony where they introduce every one of the players. I've shot one before and always thought it was a pretty cool thing to do for the kids.

The problem is I only had about 30 minutes before needing to shuffle off to another assignment. That's ok, I was able to get a decent shot of one of the little kids running on to the field as well as a couple of other shots I liked of the kids standing and sitting in the dugout waiting to take the field.

Little League, Big Emotions...

Since the majority of the sports we cover is high school and college, the summer is pretty much the dead time of the year as far as sports coverage goes. So, to get something local we spend a lot of our time covering events that we wouldn't normally cover during the rest of the year. Little League is one of them. This isn't exactly terrible, however, since it's at least the cream of the Little League crop, the all-star tournaments.

The big problem I have with covering little league is a lot of shooting baseball is anticipating action and where the ball is going to go. Normally, with high school and college hitters, I expect hitters to pull the ball. So, I set up to be ready for a player to pull the ball. This isn't really the case with little leaguers. They tend to spray the ball all over the place. It seemed like I spent more time missing plays because I anticipated the ball going the wrong way!

The best part about shooting the young kids is they are still playing just for the fun of the game and the emotion they show is pure, raw emotion. They still get excited about the little things and cheer like crazy after a home run. They even tend to cry after they strike out. I've always been a fan of the reaction shots, since my job is about telling the story of what happened, reactions are the best way to tell the story , of course provided the picture does tell the story.