Early Morning Wake up Calls, it's Football Time...

I'm still trying to catch up... Football practice recently got started which for me means mug shot tour. Shooting mugs shot of all the 11-man football players in the area. As a way of keeping my sanity I try to squeeze in shooting practice for an end of the week photo column and slideshow. This isn't always the easiest thing to do given that I'm already on a pretty tight schedule. So, most of the schools I'm shooting I only get about 10-15 minutes to get my shots before moving on to the next school.

This year was a lot harder than normal. Last year the UIL, state state's governing body for high school sports changed the rules for two-a-day practices. Instead of the way it had been done, now schools can't have a two-a-day practice until the fifth overall practice and they can't have 2 two-a-day's in a row. Not only did it cut down on the actual practice time for the players and trying to get them into playing shape. But, it also cut down on the time I had to not only shoot practice but to get mug shots. Because of less times the teams had to practice most of the schools I went to who were normally in the middle of their break were either in the middle of practice (luckily most were kind enough to work in mug shots during a water break or take a few minutes from practice to shoot mugs) or were already finished. One school was done and players were about to leave and the coach had to stop them from leaving. Luckily, only one school had to be rescheduled and only one was missed. That's about par for the way things happen every year. I even was able to make a few decent frames and work some nice early morning light.

Happy to Live Each Day...

This was a really sad story , but cool at the same time. Hawley High School head football coach Brad Schoonmaker has stage 4 Melanoma and a has less than a 10 percent chance of surviving through 5 years. I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I went out to shoot practice the team had only won 2 games and was headed into their last game of the season with no chance of making the playoffs. But, when I got there everyone's spirits were high and Schoonmaker was as nice as can be. I'd met him earlier in the year when I was shooting mug shots. He was a genuinely nice guy, but pretty business-like. When I went out there to shoot practice he was a lot more loose, and pretty easy-going. So much so, to go and throw out a few jokes about photoshopping him to look younger. I gotta say, he's the kind of guy you really want to pull for to beat the odds. Staff writer Evan Ren wrote a great story you can read here.

"Girls don't play as hard as boys."

Common Myth: Girls don't play as hard as boys in sports.

Watching softball around here on a regular basis will dispel that myth quickly. The collision in the top photo caused a 20 minute delay in the game, in which the girl sliding into second was taken off the field on a stretcher, the girl she ran into was carried off the field.

The girl carried off the field returned to the game two innings later. The one taken to the hospital was back the following week for the state tournament.