bulls & ballgames

my week in photo for the paper finished with a bull riding event at a campground up in Milan...turns out the opening night of the weekend event was the youth riding expo....wish the light had been a little better, but i was banking on getting some pre-show features and then some measure of action to run with the story....not quite the knock-out pix i was hoping for, but i think i like them

saturday was a day-long marathon in Battle Creek - had three teams in the state finals - 2 softball, 1 baseball....my initial prediction was that, given past stats, they'd all go that far and then all lose (i guess that didn't actually happen last year, which is one of the few years it feels like i haven't covered the finals, but that was my personal stats to this point)....anyway, got to the paper a bit before 7 am to gather my gear, then we were on our way for the first game - Summerfield softball playing at 10....they seemed to be well in-command and on their way to winning, until the 6th inning, when suddenly they were close, then tied going at the bottom of the 7th - so, onto the extra inning, and they held off a score at the top, then the pitcher batted in a winning run at the bottom of the inning...crazy excitement! the pitcher was absolutely overwhelmed with emotion....hard to get a good pick in the throng, but this is what we ran

and this one, i think i like best, but i didn't turn it in, cos 1) i wasn't positive about my id for the girl on the left, and 2) the distortion on her arm seemed really distracting, so while the pic we ran didn't have the kind of immersive moment feel that i liked in this one, for those reasons, i thought it may have been the better editorial decision

so, my prediction being broken, i made a new prediction (based on the "how cool would that be!" scale) - everyone's gonna win!!!!! when i saw the Milan girls getting off the bus for their game, i let them know that Summerfield won and it would just be pretty darned cool if everyone from Monroe County won titles today...but, ya know, no pressure...

so, on the couple hours downtime inbetween, i edited, sent a pic back for the web update, got my game shots edited and started to make a file for the gallery upload...by that time, it was about Milan game start, so then it was back to the softball fields

watching the warm-ups, it looked like they might have a tough fight on their hands...these girls looked tight, and they were 3-time state champs, as i later learned, so they had a lot to hang onto for their own record.....(game ended up starting late, which was gonna make things super tight for me because baseball would then be starting at the same time)....was a tough one because they were so evenly matched, and I was struggling to get decent action...by the 5th, Milan was down 2-1, then i got a call from the baseball game reporter...our team just got into their 5th inning and they were up 4-2, so i shot something in the dugout and then had to bail so i didn't totally miss the baseball game...cos i'd need action and reaction from them, and the rule seems to be that, even if you have great sad pix, they won't run or run big if there are even mediocre happy pix...so i just felt like i had to go

and i went...got there with 2 outs at the top of the 5th (our team lost the coin toss, so they batted first), so not much from that, then onto the 6th, shot the pitcher safe shot, got a grounder play (not too impressive looking though), then got a call from the writer at softball - Milan had scored and seemed to be rallying if i wanted to come back....but now i have very little from baseball, and the other team has just scored, bringing the lead to one, and there are runners on base, so it's now really close, and so i opted to just stay put - not screw up everyone by virtue of trying to get everyone - tough call, because if Milan upset and won softball i'd be missing amazing reaction, especially if Bedford baseball wound up losing it, but, then again the flipside of that could be true, and i would miss both...so, like i said, i opted to stay put...turns out Milan lost and so did Bedford, so i worked the reaction from their game best i could, and then we were on our way back to Monroe....edited, captioned and made foto galleries on the drive back....got all that in, and so after about 15-16 hours, that was the day!