A few months ago I was contacted by some of the fine folks at Glossy Finish out of Florida about helping them photograph the 2012 AYSO National Soccer Championships which were held here in Knoxville during the first week of July. After doing a bit of quick research and meeting with the Owner (Haim Ariav) and Super Operations Guru (Mel Scruggs), I was very impressed by their youth sports photography operation and jumped in with both feet 
I did a little bit of back end work (including everything from getting an electrical outlet installed for their most awesome Mobile Photo Lab to contacting every sports photographer I know within a 3 hour radius of Knoxville), everything went better than I expected for an event this size. We suffered through gale force winds, 100 + temperatures, changing schedules & field locations, etc., and “weathered all the storms” much better than I thought was possible.
Team Glossy Finish photographed 211 team portraits in two days, and provided actual in game action coverage to over 450 individual participants playing at 6 different locations over 3 days. There were a total of 220 teams from as far away as Hawaii and a total of around 3,200 players. The amazing part is the fact that nearly all of the team portraits and individual action posters and CD’s were in the hands of the parents before they left. Including all of the images provided for the AYSO, opening ceremonies, special events, etc. We shot a total of 40,000 images or so in a 6 day period. Here is a direct link to the images.
I also want to give a big thanks to all of my photographer friends who pitched in to help, you all stepped up to the plate big time and endured a lot of shooting in some pretty adverse (can you say HOT!?) conditions…so BIG THANKS!
The final thing I covered during the tournament was the Sportsmanship Award, which went to to (U14 Girls) team Lanakila (which is Hawaiian for “together in victory”) from Mililani, Hawaii. I have never met a nicer/more pleasant group of folks in my life, so I was really not surprised to see them win the award…Great Job Gals! I also want to thank Matt Winer at Glossy finish for all of his help and direction over the past month (more on that later), and especially for coming up with these images for me last week.
Here’s an example of one of the individual posters from the tournament…
And here is Team Lanakila’s Team Photo…
