State Track, Day 2...

After what seemed like a brief nap after four total hours of rain delays the day before it was time for day two of state track and this was supposed to be the long day. In the past Class 5A was all by themselves for the Saturday night meet in Austin. This year though after splitting Class 1A into two divisions they added the 3A meet with the 5A. The problem with this is it used to be that we usually only had one or two races to shoot on Saturday night and I was usually done fairly early on Saturday to make up foe the 12-15 hour day before. Not this year.

We had to get there early on Saturday for the field events, plus the 1A Div. I and 2A running events in the afternoon session. Once again it was an afternoon of a lot of shooting and not much time to edit. At least this time I had more time to edit photos and I had all my 1A and 2A photos sent before the 3A/5A session started. It also gave me time to edit a lot of the slideshow photos from earlier, giving me less work to do on the other end.

The bulk of the really good athletes for us are in Class 1A and 2A. So many of the races I was shooting in the evening session weren't going to change a whole lot of what needed to make the newspaper. Also, there weren't near as many people to cover. I even had a few breaks with as much as 30 minutes between the races I needed to shoot. I made sure to take full advantage of this running to the tent to edit and send photos when needed. Saturday seemed to go by a lot smoother. Maybe because of the weather delays the night before screwing things up. Either way, I ended up having more photos, mostly because of more athletes and more events, but things seemed to go a heck of a lot smoother.

State Track Day 1...

Like a lot of the UIL events this year things got changed around this year for state track too. Class 1A got split into two different divisions. Division I was doing some of their field events on the first day but the running events were being run on Saturday. Division II, which was had a ton of teams that we cover was all being run on Friday, all the field events as well as the running in the evening session. This not only made for a really long day, but also, very little time to sit down and edit photos between events. Since I had someone in almost every one of the Div. II events. To add to that there was a 2 hour delay in the morning to open things because of a thunderstorm.

The delay put all of the field events on a rolling schedule which meant I didn't have any time to run to the tent to edit. So, I spent most of my dinner break editing photos instead of eating (not that it would hurt me to miss a meal or 6). By the time the running events started I was still a little behind with no photos sent. Part of this is I didn't want something put on the page in case I got something I liked better or it fit with the story being written. In the back of my head I was thinking to myself that a rain delay wouldn't be the worst thing to happen. However, I didn't want the two hour rain delay that we eventually got.

The second rain delay really threw things off. The one good thing that did come out of it was I was able to get pretty caught up with a lot of the photos I already had. Plus I was able to send a bunch of photos with the possibility of getting more. After the rain delay I would shoot a few events and if I wasn't trying to edit in camera I was running up and editing between the 1A events I was shooting (the Class 4A meet was going on too and we have no 4A schools that we cover), or I was shooting an event from the top of the stands in the tent as my photos were moving or downloading a card. It wasn't the ideal situation and made for a damn long day, but it had to be done. It's a good thing I enjoy shooting track... and it's happening again, so I got to go back to the hotel for a nap before starting over again.

Stamford vs. Munday, Basketball Edition...

I can't say it enough, and this is especially true in basketball. I always get excited when I get assigned to shoot an area game because there is a pretty good chance it's going to be a good game. And this one lived up to the billing. The last time I saw Stamford and Munday playing was in a the state championship games for football, both had won there respective divisions.

This time though, the two teams were in the same district and this game would decide who was the district champions in basketball. Munday was a great collection of athletes and could make some amazing plays just based on their athletic abilities. Stamford had its own collection of really great athletes, but was a better team of basketball players. It made it a really fun game to watch and the game went down to the wire with Stamford pulling off the win. Munday had an awful night at the free throw line going 1-10 while Stamford was nearl perfect hitting 10 of 12 shots and winning the game 68-63.

Best of the Best...

When the time came this year to decide who was going to be on our All-Big Country Super Team, I knew this was going to be tough. Our area was just loaded with talent this year, especially on offense. In the past we've had some really good players, but there was always a couple that just rise to the top and had stand out years making the choices pretty simple. This year, however, there was no way around leaving out some really good players just based on how many great players we had. It made for a really fun year to cover. Having four teams win state titles, however, at this point, it became really hard. In the end the votes were tallied and the group we had were some really great players, then I had to get them into the studio for portraits. That was the fun part. I decided to go with colored backgrounds in the teams' corresponding colors.

Jerry World State Champs, Game 1...

Now that I'm nearly a month behind... Munday played Teneha in the Class 1A Div. II state championship game at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington. It was a rematch of last year's state championship. Last year Teneha won the game pretty easily, however, most of their best players had graduated while the majority of Munday's starters were returning. Teneha was loaded with underclassmen and had lost 4 of their first 5 games of the season, but had started playing a lot better since. Munday on the other hand had pretty much been beating every team they played, and beating them convincingly.

This game opened up a lot like every one of Munday's other wins of the year, with the Moguls jumping out to a quick lead and showing the superior speed they had and not letting up. The defense was looking good too and it was obvious the results this year were going to be a lot different than last year. Both the offense and defense were looking great and Munday ended up winning 42-14. After watching most of our local teams lose in the state championship games last year it was nice to see things turns around this year with the third local team to win and one more game left.