Beautiful Day for Sports

April 10, 2010

Spring weather in Montana is as indecisive as it gets.  Whereas it was freezing cold and snowing yesterday, today was perfectly sunny and warm all day.  Thank goodness it was too since I shot outside for five hours this afternoon.

My first stop was at Loyola’s softball field to catch a couple innings of the Breakers facing Eureka/Troy.  This was actually my first time ever shooting softball… it’s harder than I thought.  It’s tough to follow the ball cleanly off of the bat looking through lens that is in black and white.  I can only hope I get much better before baseball season rolls in.  I left after the second inning as Loyola jumped out to a 8-0 lead.  It wasn’t so much that Loyola was knocking the crap out of the ball, but they were making consistent contact and Eureka’s fielders had all sorts of throwing errors that were leading to runs for the Breakers.  Loyola ended up winning the game 10-3.

After that, I headed to Washington Grizzly Stadium to join Kayla at the Grizzly football scrimmage.  The team looked good, especially offensively.  Coach Pflugrad has definitely changed up the offensive scheme as we knew he would.  There was a lot of no huddle and the play ratio was very pass-heavy.  There were quite a few end around and reverse type plays when we did run the ball.  Jabin Sambrano looked sharp and should be quite the playmaker for us next season.  Bryce Carver also looked like a bright spot in my opinion.  For a little guy, he made a number of athletic plays as wide receiver and I can see him getting a lot of snaps next year.  The only conundrum I saw was that Chase Reynolds didn’t get any action.  It appears Pflugrad didn’t want to play him today as he tests out players at new positions… then again I suppose Reynolds won’t need as many repetitions when we’ll be running a spread offense aerial attack with some draws, screens and reverses.

After the scrimmage we interviewed Dodson, Sambrano, Selle, and Coach Pflugrad.   It was nice to hear each of the players being honest and optimistic about the transitions of coaching staff and play-book structure that they’ve dealt with so far this off-season.  It truly appears that the team is coming together and finding its new identity.

After the scrimmage I shot an actual football game in Washington Grizzly… the Missoula Phoenix taking on the Glacier Knights in Rocky Mountain Football League (RMFL) action.  I could only stay for the first half.  While I was there, the Phoenix jumped out to a 12-0 lead as a result of a pair of deep touchdown passes.  The Phoenix ended up winning the game by a final of 18-13, improving their record to 1-1 on the season.

After all that fun in the sun, I finally returned to the station just after six o’clock to edit my footage for the 10 o’clock news.  All in all a very productive day in shooting new sports and watching our football team evolve before my eyes.