The second day of state tennis is always the more exciting, photo-wise. The championship matches are almost always filled with emotion. And Wylie was trying to make history by sweeping all five of the matches in Class 3A. Last year they won four, boys and girls singles, mixed and boys doubles. The only one they didn't win state in was girls doubles, they finished second. This time they had a chance to do it again with players or teams in all five of the championship matches.
They day started out with boys and girls singles and mixed doubles playing all at once. Luckily they kept all three of the matches were being played on adjoining courts. That helped a little in that I wasn't having to run all over the complex, like in years past. However, with all three players winning in straight sets it did make it a little tougher to shoot, but I kind of had an idea who would win their matches first so I was able to plan a little bit of where I needed to be and when. I was surprised a little bit to see some of the celebrations, they were a little better then the others.
In addition to Wylie, we also had a boys singles player in the Class 2A championship match. The was on the other side of the stadium courts, not too far away, I was at least able to keep an eye on it to make sure I didn't miss anything. Luckily that match was pretty close so I was able to finish shooting all the early Wylie matches before moving over there to shoot it as well. Things ended up working out well, after Wylie won all three of their matches I was able to move over and shoot the last half of the second set of the 2A match, another win.
The boys and girls doubles matches were the final matches of the day. The Wylie boys and girls teams were playing on opposite sides of the stadium. This made it a little tougher, but easy enough to deal with. I started out shooting from the stands up high. It made for nice enough photos. Then I moved down to court level. They were playing on a court that also had access from the sides so I could get to court level. Both the boys and girls teams do a really good job of showing a lot of emotion throughout the season, so I knew there should be some pretty good celebrations following at least one of the matches, at least I had hoped.
The ends of both of the matches literally happened within minutes of each other. I was running back and forth trying to figure out who would win first. The girls were cruising along at first, up 4-0 and then ended up losing three straight and winning in a tiebreaker in the second set. The boys didn't go to a tiebreaker but it ended up being pretty close as well.
The girls match ended on the other team hitting a shot out and the line judge taking forever to make the call, before finally saying it was out, there was a nice little celebration, but not nearly what I was hoping for, a winner at the net would have been nice, but there was still the boys match going on leaving me hope.
I got to the boys match and had a great position courtside for the final match. I could almost breathe a sigh of relief. With six total matches and everyone having won their matches I hadn't missed one yet. Now that I didn't have any other matches to shoot I felt good about what I had so far, but now I wanted the big emotional shot. I was feeling pretty good about it now that this match was tightening up a bit and getting kind of heated. The "winner" shot that I really wanted ended up happening on the shot before match point. Then on match point I was all set and ready. The Wylie team had the momentum and were up. Then probably the worst thing could have happened, the other team double faulted, match over. Damn! I ended up going with the shot from the point before, it told the story of the match a lot better and was a nice shot. I only wish those two points would have been flip flopped. All in all, it worked out well, I ended up with some really nice frames and Wylie made history in the process becoming the first school to sweep all five matches in the same classification in the same year.
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