By Seth A. McConnell

And after three days the state tennis tournament is finally over and it couldn’t have wrapped up in a grander fashion. The final match was the deciding match on who (Stevens or O’Gorman) would be the team champions and what a match it was. Hands down the best of the entire tournament the only thing that would have made it better would have been if it would’ve been Stevens vs O’Gorman instead of Central (Not knocking Central in the least, those boys played very well and deserved to be playing for the second flight championship. I’m talking for the pure reason of drama)

It was back and forth the entire match so I concentrated on reaction mainly trying to capture both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat knowing full well that I would need one for our sports lead tomorrow. Tennis is a fairly mellow sport with only the occasionally outburst (at least at this level). Stevens did manage to win the match leaving my shots of dejection in the trash bin… or for blog only purposes. If Stevens would have lost these would probably would’ve been in contention for the lead.

This is all the more excitement I was able to capture in the manor of jubilation from winning.

In the top flights where Stevens and O’Gorman faced off Stevens beat them handily making for good dejection shots.

Its interesting to think had Stevens lost key points against Central the sports page may look a heck of a lot different in the morning.

Congratulations to Stevens on their third consecutive team title and to all the individual champions as well.

I put a who slew of images into a slide show which can be viewed here

-S

By Seth A. McConnell

I had to use three exclamation points not because its that exciting but more to try and raise my level of excitement. Its been a tough week here in the photo department as Kristina is in the land of Kentucky at a workshop leaving Ryan and I to our own devices… which may or may not be a good thing. Today has been a particularly rough day with the Region 8A track meet in Custer which just happened to coincide with a bomb threat, Hillary Clinton making a surprise stop in Rapid and the start of the Boys State Tennis Tournament coupled with our day to day assignments its been a wild one.

Anyways back to tennis. I had the fortune of covering the first day of the boys state tennis meet. It was your standard day 1 with the high ranking seeds playing the low ranking seeds. Not a lot of excitement but I got more than my fair share of tennis and thanks to a 400mm lens I got some pretty decent shots out of it.

That was day one (or at least a small portion of day one). I’m covering day two as well and heck maybe even day three! Hopefully the action will be a lot more intense in the morning and I can get some sweet reaction shots instead of just action.

-S