Boy I had my work cut out for me yesterday…got up early on my day off and rode with my mom and dad down to Eureka High School….talk about a huge complex…several buildings spread out in the valley on the north side of town….one of them contains a nice sized pool and aquatic center…my sister asked me to come down and shoot some photos of my nephew Zach, before and during his water polo game. I have never even seen a water polo game so didnt really know what to expect, but it was def interesting. Mom wanted to get down there early enough to watch them warming up, thinking Zach`s game started at 4:30 pm, so we arrived at 4:15 pm and found out the JV team plays at 4:30 and the Varsity team, which Zach is on, plays after that…one thing they were right on about, it was like a sauna in there…if the air conditioning was on, we never felt it. I didnt take any photos during the JV game, just sat and watched the game and tried to figure it out…looked like a basketball game in terms of fouls and trying to take the ball away, and a little lopsided since one end of the pool is obviously shallow and the other deep, so there is a lot of treading water involved, specially for one of the goalies at all times, and swimming for those players in the middle of the pool on offense and defense. Def a strenuous game four quarters of six minutes each on JV and seven minutes each on Varsity and much easier to figure out than hockey.

Now mind you, most guys don’t like to have their photo taken right before a game, but Zach said to me, I like having my picture taken…so I took him down to the goal post to shoot some photos of him for his mom…she came down shortly after to tell him that she wanted him in a different pose…so we shot some of his idea and some of hers.

…after taking a few of him like this, I let him go warm up so he could get his hair wet….

…that’s what the orders were, to take photos of him before the warm up, so his hair would be dry and show off his new hair cut. 🙂

During the game, I joined my youngest niece Courtney, on the front row of the bleachers and we both photographed Zach during the game…Courtney is an aspiring photographer and planning to attend college for photojournalism…we compared notes and screens while shooting, she was getting some good photos as well as some blurry ones, same as me…we couldn’t set our speed up as high as  wanted to stop the action, and not have the grain show up in the image…I did like the water reflections though…

…by the way…they were playing Clayton High School….

…it was a great game, very hard fought game, both teams playing aggressively and Eureka at one time was up by many goals, many scored by Zach, I can see now why they were passing the ball to him alot…never did see any of his baseball games but always heard how he was a fast and hard throwing pitcher…they went into double overtime and lost during sudden death playoff…the officials seemed to be  a bit one sided and against Eureka…and the Clayton coach seemed to pick up on that and take advantage of it…he kept coming down the side of the pool to talk to them and you never once saw the officials get onto any of the Clayton players…..I told the lady I was sitting next to, had that happened in a baseball game, he would have been tossed ten minutes ago…that’s what makes it such a disappointing loss, if coaches would simply coach and let the officials handle the officiating without any interference from the coaches, it would make the game alot more enjoyable not only from the spectators side of things, but from the players as well.

Eureka definately has good teams though as well as a good coaching staff.