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Watching the Yankees-Rangers game on ESPN right now seeing Gary Pettis’ ejection over a close call at first (I think the umps were right) reminds me of today’s St. Thomas/Gustavus matchup. Cody Sukalski hit a slow chopper to second and I put the photo in our gallery of his foot on the bag with Firstbaseman John Means’ foot on the bag, stretched out and the ball is still at least two feet away from making contact. [box score: play-by-play]

He was called out. It won’t change the outcome of the game by any means now – it wasn’t the last play of the game with the bases loaded and Gustavus wasn’t even threatening. But check out the photo.

Umpires are fallible. Mistakes happen. Close calls are forgivable, but this one wasn’t. Close that is.

As photographers we’re all about the freeze-frame. That single snapshot (pun intended) that defines a moment and this was one of them.

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Concordia-Moorhead celebrates their victory over Carleton in PKs in the MIAC Women's Soccer Championship game. Photo by Katrina Styx, d3photography.com

Tonight marks the start of the NCAA Division III soccer playoffs. and the first game kicks off with a men’s match at 5 pm Eastern tonight between Transylvania and Lynchburg, and a women’s match at 8 pm ET (5pm Pacific) between Redlands and Chapman.

We’ll have our best soccer playoff coverage to date with six photographers confirmed for matches around the country:

1. Joe Bergman is covering the SCIAC tournament, starting with the Redlands/Chapman tilt tonight and the winner at Cal Lutheran on Saturday
2. Jeffrey Levy will be at the TCNJ regional
3. Daryl Tessmann will be at the UW-Whitewater regional on Saturday
4. Larry Radloff will be at the UW-Oshkosh regional
5. Scott Pierson will be covering the Macalester regional victors on Saturday
6. I will be at UW-Whitewater for the match between the Saturday victors.

We’ll also have some football covered this weekend with Matt Milless at the CORTACA game (Cortland State vs. Ithaca), Joe will be at the Occidental / Cal Lutheran game on Saturday, too, and I will be at the Monon Bell rivalry game between Wabash College and DePauw University – the 117th matchup between these two teams in the oldest football rivalry game in the Midwest.

Basketball, around the corner

Basketball season is right around the corner. November 15 is the earliest day the NCAA allows Division III teams to schedule a regular season game (they can play up to two scrimmages prior – often against teams from other divisions). This will make the number of sports we have coverage for in a news environment to twelve.

1. Men’s Basketball
2. Women’s Basketball
3. Men’s Soccer*
4. Women’s Soccer*
5. Football*
6. Div I Men’s Ice Hockey
7. Div I Women’s Ice Hockey
8. Div III Men’s Ice Hockey
9. Div III Women’s Ice Hockey
10. Wrestling
11. Men’s Swimming & Diving
12. Women’s Swimming & Diving

* denotes fall sports in playoffs

Wow, that’s a lot. And the baseball season starts in February. We will be working the Division III Men’s Frozen Four at Ridder Arena in Minneapolis for USCHO, the Division I Men’s Frozen Four at the XCel Energy Center in April for CollegeHockeyNews.com, the early rounds of the Div III men’s and women’s basketball playoffs for D3hoops.com, the Stagg Bowl for D3football.com and the men’s and women’s soccer championships for D3soccer.com in December. A busy few months ahead for us, including the MIAC Swimming and Diving Championship and a few other conference meets that we’re going to try and finalize the next few months.

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We’re all over the place this week.

Well, not really, but we’re really busy. And another blog to come covering rivalry games and the interest things seen on the sidelines and in the games, the drama that makes them all the more fun (some coverage in this week’s D3football Around the Nation podcast).

Football
No. 19 St. John’s hosts No. 4 St. Thomas – Photos by Ryan Coleman, Scott Pierson, Tim Ward and Greg Kremer. And possibly a guest appearance from Pat Coleman of D3football.com (in video interviews below)

No. 2 Mount Union hosts No. 8 Ohio Northern – David Rich
Redlands hosts No. 23 Cal Lutheran in a night game – Joe Bergman
Methodist hosts Maryville (Tenn.)  – Bruce Lee
Wisc.-Oshkosh hosts Wisc.-La Crosse in a night game – Larry Radloff

Soccer
St. Thomas hosts No. 15 Wisc.-Whitewater, Men’s – Caleb Williams
Methodist hosts Shenendoah, Men’s – Bruce Lee
Wisc-Oshkosh hosts N0. 10 Wisc.-Stevens Point, Women’s [gallery] – Larry Radloff
Bethel hosts Concordia-Moorhead, Men’s [gallery] – Ryan Coleman
Bethel hosts No. 19 Concordia-Moorhead, Women’s [gallery] – Ryan Coleman
Macalester hosts Carleton, Men’s [gallery] – Ryan Coleman
Augsburg hosts St. Olaf, Men’s [gallery] – Ryan Coleman

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Around the gridiron the phrase using your head is often associated with a direct helmet-to-helmet hit. Something that is neither a good thing to do or witness, and may send chills down the backs of the spectators, coaches, officials and sports medicine staff.

I was witness to a Monmouth (Ill.) player who took such a hard hit against St. John’s (Minn.) in the opening round of the 2005 playoffs that play was stopped for at least a half hour after being knocked unconscious and he had a seizure on the field. He was taken by stretcher to an ambulance off the side of the stadium where he was kept until after the game, when he had regained feeling in his toes, and spent a few days in a St. Cloud hospital.

Click thumbnail to see full shot

This past weekend I witnessed a potentially similar scenario play out as a Central Dutch linebacker made a delayed hit on the just out-of-bounds on Coe receiver Andrew Squires. While it appeared that Squires was not injured on the apparent helmet-on-helmet hit, the linebacker was spoken to by an official and Coe head coach Steve Stalker shared his dislike for the contact with the official. Nothing came of the play in the rulings on the field, however.

So that’s the harrowing side of the use of one’s head in a game. We’d like to highlight to fun, exciting and remarkable side of the subject: Having the wherewithal in the game to make an outstanding decision at a key moment that seals the victory or turns the tables, or is just simply remarkable.

Their head is in the game and the pivotal play comes to, well, “mind”.

A sequence set of Mellick's forced fumble-turned-touchback on Saturday.

Coe’s Dillon Mellick did just that a few minutes earlier in the game. Central’s Mike Furlong had caught a pass inside the Coe red zone and he had Mellick beat by a step. But he stepped up, forcing the ball out of Furlong’s hands which bounced out on the five yard line and bounced into the back of the endzone for a Cohawk touchback.

As Mellick told the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

“I got burned on it,” the senior from Waukon said. “But I could see he was holding the ball wide, so I just went for it all and got it.”

That heads-up decision, with the score 30-28 in Coe’s favor, helped seal the victory. They padded it later with a touchdown and timely interception with less than two minutes remaining. No. 9 Coe held on to defeat No. 7 Central 37-28.

There is more to it than just making a great play

St Scholastica's Greg Doornink (4) heads the ball over St Thomas' Mike Hutton (22) on Sept. 21.

In soccer, using your head has a different connotation: using your head to make a header. That’s where this blog came to on Thursday afternoon while covering the St. Thomas vs. St. Scholastica men’s soccer match. As Matt Milless wrote last week in “Did you get that?” finding that stop-action photo that makes you look at it in wonder and amazement, such as the header, is very difficult to capture consistently, if at all, for periods of time.

We, as photographers, may make it look easy, that we get those photos a lot if you look at our best works; but at d3photography.com we strive on the quality of the work we publish, not the quantity of the photos we take at an event. I don’t mean to generalize wire photographers here, but there are many who will fire off many thousands of photos in a quarter of football, half of soccer or basketball or a period of a hockey game just to have that “perfect” shot for the game. They may take 1,000-2,500 photos in a given window of a game and run one, two, 10 or 20 photos in a gallery online, a couple of pictures in the next publication – if space allows.

Our photographers work to include all the relevant photos from a game for news purposes, but also for the purposes of the fans to see, and have a memory of the game.

In the St. Thomas vs. St. Scholastica match from last week, out of the 193 photos published in our photo gallery I had 19 photos of attempted headers. Most of them were spot on (by the players) and the looks on their faces and the displacement of the air in the ball is apparent.

As you will see on the right, a “perfect header photo” (just like a perfect slapshot, baseball liner, basketball jumpshot) is right when the ball shows no displacement of air.

But who really wants to see a perfectly shaped ball, anyway?

Go inside to more photos from our photographers

(continue reading…)

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This was originally published on D3football.com on Sunday, September 26, 2010.

By Ryan Coleman
d3photography.com

Laird Stadium stood under feet of water on Saturday evening, casting the location of this upcoming Saturday’s home game against Augsburg into doubt. Photo by Ryan Coleman, d3photography.com

As the sun rose over Carleton’s picturesque campus in Northfield, Minn., Friday morning Laird Stadium was dry. But as the hours progressed, the rising water of the Cannon River spun the tables on the school’s 7,500-seat football stadium.

At 7 a.m. Carleton officials would have told you that they could host a football game, if scheduled to, on Saturday afternoon. But by 9 a.m. an email went out to players on the football team to come down and empty out the locker room. An hour later there was a foot-and-a-half of water on the field, and it was rising fast.

Southern Minnesota was hit with a monsoon of storms, many local meteorologists likened its arrival as to many winter storms that often hit the state. But this occurred during the warm month of September, not December or January as they often do. If this storm had struck the region in the winter months it could have packed a crippling amount of snow ranging from 30 inches in the Twin Cities to over 100 inches in Amboy, Minn., midway between Mankato (home to Bethany Lutheran and nearby to Gustavus Adolphus and Martin Luther) and Interstate 90.

But the 73-year old Laird Stadium isn’t the only victim to Carleton athletics. Next to the field is the West Gym, home to basketball, volleyball and swimming. By 4 p.m. Saturday the basement had “about 3.5 feet of water,” said Sports Information Director Dave Pape. “I didn’t have hip-waders on, so that’s just an estimate.”

The sump pumps were shut off as they just were unable to keep up with the amount of water coming in through the foundation. The basement, a full level below the gymnasium floor, has been used primarily for storage of equipment and is the home to the filter and pumps for the natatorium. Pape added that there may have been some loss of historical archives, but he was not sure to what extent.

Student-athletes had been helping take as much out as they could that was not already lost to the rising water. He is confident that the water will not rise high enough to reach the gymnasium floor — a situation, should it occur, could very well be devastating to Carleton hosting any more home events in volleyball or basketball.

And past the gym, a little further upstream is the football and men’s soccer practice field. In the middle of that field sits a regulation soccer goal, with all but the last foot of the eight-foot tall frame underwater. (Soccer is played on a field across campus, on higher ground.)

Carleton’s practice field is on the other side of the gymnasium, on lower ground. Photo by Ryan Coleman, d3photography.com

Three bridges that directly connect the campus to the western part of town, where fellow Division III school St. Olaf sits on much higher ground, have been closed by the National Guard. The city has declared a state of emergency and Division Street (which runs along the side of Laird Stadium, the West Gym and the practice field) is open only to campus traffic and is closed beyond the library parking lot. Laird also has 22 dorm rooms nearby, with 30 students living in them. They have been evacuated, although their living arrangements were unclear.

Former athletic director Leon Lunder, a Northfield resident since 1950, told Pape that he has never seen water reach Laird Stadium before.

But what does this leave Carleton with? They have their homecoming scheduled next Saturday against Augsburg at 1 p.m.. School president Steven Poskanzer is insistent that Laird Stadium will host homecoming on time but athletic director Gerald Young told WCCO-TV on Saturday that may not happen.

“I think it’s a long shot. That’s why at the beginning of the week we are going to look at what some of the other options of what we have to do. We would love to get out here for homecoming, but I think it’s a real long shot.”

They have a few options, although nothing is confirmed and may not be for many days: They could play at Laird, except it will take days for the water to subside, the field to dry and the facility to be approved for use after it has dried out. St. Olaf is hosting Bethel and does not have lights.

Northfield High School’s field has lights and, according to an email from Carleton, does not have any events scheduled for it on Sept. 25.

Contributing: Larry Radloff, d3photography.com

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Photo by Ryan Coleman, d3photography.com

I’m a little late on this post, but I have a bunch of photos from our photographers from week two of the 2010-2011 sports season.

Football
No. 1 Wisc.-Whitewater vs. Dakota State [gallery]
Wisc.-Oshkosh vs. No. 2 Mount Union [gallery]
No. 24 Cal Lutheran vs. No. 4 Linfield [gallery]
Ithaca vs. Union [gallery]
Gustavus Adolphus vs. Wartburg [gallery]
Occidental vs. Puget Sound [gallery]
Augsburg vs. Martin Luther [gallery]
Hamline vs. Pacific Lutheran [gallery]
Pomona-Pitzer vs. Whitworth [Coming Soon]

Men’s Soccer
Augsburg vs. Clarke [gallery]
Macalester vs. Nebraska Wesleyan [gallery]

Volleyball – Augsburg Invitational
St. Thomas vs. Wisc.-Eau Claire [gallery]
St. Thomas vs. Northwestern (Minn.) [gallery]
St. Benedict vs. Wisc.-Eau Claire [gallery]
Macalester vs. Central [gallery]
Augsburg vs. Edgewood [gallery]
Wisc.-Eau Claire vs. Edgewood [gallery]

Photos below courtesy of: David Rich, Daryl Tessmann, Larry Radloff, Dan Harris and Ryan Coleman

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Jay Priest collected 47 yards on three receptions for No. 11 Ohio Northern in the kickoff game of the 2010 Div III football season. Photo by David Rich, d3photography.com

Our first event is in the books: Ohio Northern defeated Wisc.-River Falls 35-21 to kickoff the 2010 NCAA Division III football season. David Rich was there, submitted a few photos with more to come later on tonight. Check back here over the weekend for select photos from each of the games we are covering.

Events on the schedule:

Football

No. 1 Wisc.-Whitewater hosts Adrian (Mich.) [gallery]
St. Norbert hosts No. 5 St. Thomas (Minn.) [gallery]
No. 7 Central hosts Wisc.-Oshkosh [gallery]
No. 8 Wittenberg vs. Olivet [gallery]
No. 9 St. John’s (Minn.) hosts Northwestern (Minn.)
No. 11 Ohio Northern hosts Wisc.-River Falls [gallery]
Wartburg hosts No. 17 Monmouth (Ill.) [gallery]
Augsburg hosts Concordia (Wisc.) [gallery]
Crown hosts Carleton [gallery]

Soccer

Mens – Macalester hosts Northwestern (Minn.) [gallery]
Mens – Hamline hosts Wartburg [gallery]
Mens – Macalester hosts Loras [gallery]
Womens – Macalester hosts Loras [gallery]

Volleyball

Union hosts Sage [gallery]
Skidmore vs. Sage [gallery]

A reminder: We have digital downloads for sale – email that photo without the watermarks, take it to your own lab and print it for less and do it in less time. And we are offering 50% off all shipping (that’s right, all shipping) in the month of September. But on October 1st it will be full rate again.

Photo gallery inside. (continue reading…)

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