One Game at a Time

It's been awhile since I posted. I'm working on a proposal for my company and it's really sucked up a lot of time. Normally we have a decent amount of time to prepare for bidding on work but in this case we had 5 days. Between my day job, my night job, and bidding this work my time has been really strapped.

But I'm down in North Carolina right now and a band of showers from TS Fay is moving across the island giving me a great chance to update my blog with a few posts.

Dave Lovell and I are going to be the folks from the DC Sports Box responsible for covering Maryland Athletics this fall, and tonight's exhibition women's soccer game against the West Virginia Mountaineers gave me a chance to pass the torch over to Dave for a few weeks while I'm down in North Carolina. We met up at Ludwig Field prior to the exhibition game against West Virginia and went over some of the basics of the field layout. I told Dave about the poor lighting as well as where they typically allow us to go around the field and where they restrict us from. I also introduced him to the CSC folks that regularly work the games.

One of the CSC guys gave us a bit of a hard time and was somewhat confrontational when describing where he would allow us to go and where we could not approach. He quipped about "if you go in there those cameras are mine". Afterwards Dave remarked to me "with all this work maybe we just shouldn't be here!". I thought his observation was both funny and on-the-money with respect to covering athletics. We don't want to interfere with the game at all and we have no interest in going places where we would risk our own safety or influence the game. At the same time I don't think some of the CSC guards realize that. I know they're just doing their jobs but there was a harshness associated with his tone that made us feel really unwelcome ... at an exhibition women's soccer game.

Dave and I shot the game from opposite sides of the field to get the best coverage and it worked pretty well. This Fall should be interesting from a process standpoint because we'll need to coordinate the photo editing for multiple photographers at the same event. In the past it has been just Dave or just me photographing an event. But with Dave and I doubling up on a few events we're going to have to figure out how to best blend our sets of shots. For this event I wrote the article and Dave picked the photos he wanted for the gallery. In the future I suppose we'll just do the same.

It'd be great if we had some easy way of merging my photos with his. It's something to remember for Avalanche...

Our photos and article that describe the Maryland Terrapins vs West Virginia Mountaineers exhibition women's soccer game at Ludwig Field in College Park are up on the DC Sports Box website. Additionally you can find my photoset of WVU vs the Terps on Flickr.