State Golf, Day 1...

Going into the week, I was thinking that shooting state golf this year was going to be a lot easier than the past since I didn't have to split thing with tennis. Damn, was I wrong. This may have been the toughest time I've had shooting golf in a long time, mostly just because of the sheer number of golfers we had in the tournaments. Normally in the past we'd have a couple of teams competing and I could spend time shooting the better teams and then grab a few shots of the others.

This year, though, we had six teams competing in three classes and in Class A there were two boys and girls teams. Not to mention a bunch of individual players. To break this down: I had to shoot on three different courses, and when the girls start of the back nine, the boys start on the front. Basically, I was spending a whole lot more time walking the golf course (since in my 10 years of doing this, I'm yet to find the rumored media cart that is allegedly out there) carrying all my camera gear around with me. When it's just a couple of teams I can spend a few holes watching players, seeing how things develop. This time though, I was shooting a player for a hole and plotting where or who I'd be shooting next at the same time, it really kind of sucked.

The other problem I ended up running in to was most of our teams and players were all having bad rounds at the same time. It was rather uncharacteristic of what I was used to shooting in the past. The only good thing coming out of all of this was that golfers playing bad usually translates into sand shots or nice facial expressions. So, even given all of the time constraints, I managed to pull off a few decent shots, though it was mostly of players not pulling them off.