Last week I went to Lake Travis High School to catch a morning practice for the Statesman.
Lake Travis football has an interesting recent history. They’ve won the 4A state championship title five years in a row. That’s a state record. This year, they’re moving up to 5A, but they’re so good that they’re ranked second in 5A. Everyone’s watching to find out how they’ll compete.
Practice started at 7 a.m. (it was their latest start all week), and I had about an hour drive out there, so I was up at 5:30 a.m. and on the road by 6 a.m.
It was still pretty dark out when I arrived at the stadium a few minutes before 7 a.m., but practice was in full swing. I found the head coach and he helped me identify which players I was looking for. Then I kind of had to watch for a few minutes until the sun started to peek over the horizon, and I had enough light to shoot.
I was assigned to shoot varsity defense, and I had a short list of players that would be featured. Varsity and both JV teams were practicing all together, so there were probably 200 players on the field. It’s hard to keep track of anyone in a crowd that size, but put them all in the same outfit and well…
Anyway, I did my best to find who I needed and catch them in action. It turns out the defense wasn’t practicing well that day, or at least the coach didn’t think so. I ended up getting a lot of shots of football players running laps.
There were two players in particular I needed – safety Brock Kenyon and linebacker Luke Hutton (pictured at the top). Since I didn’t get great action on either of them I took that portrait quickly after practice.
Here’s the action I got of them and a few other defenders.
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