Saturday I ventured up to Bishop Manogue High School to shoot the 2013 NIAA State Division 1 Football Semifinal. Reed High (Sparks) hosted Liberty High (Henderson).
Check out the full gallery here… https://instaimage.com/NIAA/football/2013semifinal
What a FANTASTIC day for football! I shot this pano with my phone at half time… compared to the bitter cold we’ve had and all night games, a big reason I went was simply because the opportunity to shoot with such great conditions! Yes, I was hoping for a great game too… and this one did NOT disappoint! Wow!
As always you try to chat with people around the stadium to get their “take” on the game… with this one, it was all over the board, Liberty was favored, Reed was favored, blah blah blah… when I showed up and started setting up the Liberty kids were warming up at this near end… they have some BIG kids! Wow! Apparently we don’t grow ’em like that up here in the north state! 🙂 Would that be a factor? What did the Football Gods have in store for us today?
I also had an ulterior motive with this game… been messing with the camera and the auto focus settings… trying to get a “better” one… full sunlight, good contrasty uniforms, should make for a good test day… well… I’ll start the photos off with this… Reed’s game winning touchdown… see that blurry bit behind the FANTASTICALLY in focus ref? The camera LOVES the ref… his ultimate contrast uniform is the camera’s biggest delight… I would have completely snarffed this shot anyway so maybe it’s not such a deal but here’s what happens… the real stuff… “… did you get that shot?”… Yes I did… TOTALLY out of focus and there’s a significant “distraction”… but yes, yes I did get it… 🙂 Opps!
So the “scouting reports” say that Reed (who I’ve seen once vs. Carson in the bitter cold last week…) will run a lot but has a good passing game as well and Liberty likes to air it out and has a good passing game… so I tried to get a little quarterback action…
Here Liberty’s quarterback looking to air one out down field on some down and long…
Reed’s quarterback… I just liked these two shots of him….
So after watching this awhile, I had a hunch… I went down to the end zone and waited… and Liberty delivered! Airmail for Liberty #2!
As you can see… 7:31 to go in the 2nd quarter… between hard nosed defense by Reed and HUGE costly penalties by Liberty… we saw 3rd and long… so long I had to take a photo because it’s the “long”est that any of us had ever seen in a football game… 3rd and 51… over half the field!!
Here’s some of that Reed hard nosed defense…
Reed’s running back on his way to a second half touchdown!
So for those of you that didn’t see the game… They battled back and forth for a lot of the game… In my opinion, Reed kinda always had the upper hand, their opening drive for example, after Liberty had burned a BUNCH of time off the clock and missed a field goal… Reed sprinted up the field in two plays and were on the scoreboard 7-0… so there was a lot of back and forth, I score, you score, I score… then we came down to this play… Reed was marching up the field… Liberty intercepted but the Reed wide out turned it all around and stripped the ball from the Liberty player… Did I mention above this was a GREAT football game!
Reed was able to march up the field one last time and go ahead 35-31….
Which led to this attempted… and I say attempted because you have to see the end result in the next photo to understand the outcome… 
… with 7 seconds left on the clock the Liberty pass from the above image ended up like this… Reed took a knee with seven seconds to go to go onto the State Championship at UNLV on Saturday, December 7th against Bishop Gorman. Congratulations and good luck to both teams next week!
