Putting My Camera in Position for the Thrill of Victory & the Agony of Defeat
Stop! Before you scroll, look at this photo and think about what could happen next.
For a little added context, this is a shootout at the end of a state final soccer game and St. Charles North High School’s Chloe Kirsten has the dubious task of needing to make a goal to keep the game going.
The setup
After an entire season of girls high school soccer in Illinois, with two other IHSA classes having crowed their champions this day, the class 3A title game was underway. It’s the class for the largest high schools in the state, with New Trier and St. Charles North battling it out on the field at North Central College. The weather had been rough all day. Clouds, mid-60s temps, and rain or mist in each game. By game time things are barely hanging on to 60 and nothing is dry.
While the rain had stopped by the end of regulation, just like it took all day to for it to end, the 3A title game has taken all 100-minutes of time and has entered the shootout phase tied at three.
What to do? Where to shoot from?
While many photographers are shooting for just one team or photographing the game as a whole, focused on the winners regardless. I’m in an interesting situation because I’m working for the Chicago Tribune, which owns both the Pioneer Press weekly publications that New Trier is in the coverage area for. As well as the Aurora Beacon-News, which St. Charles North is in the coverage area for. I have two reporters filing separate stories focused on each of the schools.
Because of this I typically default to a end zone position focused on each penalty kicker hoping for a winning kick. I make sure to have the benches for each team within a good view as the kicker will typically run towards them as they sprint onto the field. There’s also a possibility there’s a sprint towards mid-field where alternate kickers are standing in the center circle. If I was only covering one team I’d have been standing on the sideline opposite the benches with a view of the goalie and kicker positions. Making sure to get a winning or losing reaction for the one team.
An added obstacle here is the game stories always feature one player as the highlight. In most sports a writer will have a good idea who they will write about come late in the game. This is super helpful as it allows me to sell out on a player and make sure I have some good closeups or extra action shots. Soccer’s lack of eye popping stats and low scores can make this almost impossible for a writer to nail down a subject to write about. Throw in a single deciding factor like a sudden death shootout and all planning goes out the window. I’m at the whims of the soccer gods here and most likely that means a winning kicker for sure. But most likely isn’t 100%. More on that later.
Without further ado, here’s a moment in time.
The Agony of My Defeat
As I mentioned above, figuring out who a writer will highlight for the story kind of goes out the window when overtime happens. While the writer who was covering St. Charles North stuck with an earlier subject, the North Star’s Kaitlin Glenn, whom I had plenty of game photos of. The writer for New Trier through me for a loop, not going with any of the leading candidates they mentioned earlier, but with the goalie, freshman Annie Fowler.
Even though I had some decent shots of her in goal, the editors ended up running some file photo of her from another photographer. Which is usually a big slap in the face that I didn’t do my job well enough. While it was a little bit agonizing for me, it had more to do with the writer submitting the story thinking that I would have filed photos of her. Which I did not since she was on the list of possible players we would focus on. By the time I got that info, the story was already filed and online before I could send these photos. Although, I do believe one of these may have ended up in the print version.
