See The Changes

In a cruel twist of weather, summer finally arrived in NEPA this weekend, making for a long hot day for the 12 teams in the 6th annual Patriot Cup soccer tournament. Our determined staff couldn't arrive until the 10 am games, (beauty sleep) but managed to stay out in the heat until the thrilling end of this pre-season festival, resulting in almost 700 photos from the day.

Many of you know that my youngest son graduated this past spring, and some have wondered how that will affect things here at FotoFink. At this point, it looks like I will be keeping at this for a while, but with a bit more variety. Holy Redeemer soccer and volleyball will still have a key spot here, but I would like to try some other teams, other sports, and should now have the time to do so. As a result, there are pictures from most of the 12 teams at the tournament on the site, (more on that later), with a bias towards teams/players/parents who have supported this endeavor (bought pictures) in the past.

Here are a few random thoughts from Saturday's excursion-

Pittston Primary Center is one of my favorite places to shoot. The backgrounds are, for the most part, amazing. The mountains in the distance, the wooded areas, the grassy hills all provide a much cleaner background than most fields. Generally, the spectators are up and out of the way from the sidelines as well, which is another big plus in that area. The picture at the top of this post is a good example.

I went in following 2 teams, HR, (of course) and Coughlin (by request of some parents at the Ian Pope Tournament). I was pleasantly surprised to find Crestwood there, and met some of the Pittston parents who seemed awfully interested in the site. Needless to say, this made for a busy day of shooting! I tried to get all of the teams in at least some of the shots, but...

This is just a rumor, but I was told that there was one team that withdrew itself (walked off) after one of their players was shown a red card. Had they played more, I likely would have had some shots of them in the gallery as well. No one asked for my opinion on this, but IF this was true, I am surprised and disappointed. There were lots of frustrations surrounding the officiating (I saw at least 8 penalty kicks in the matches I watched- that's absurd!) but there is always the question of whether that's the ref's or the player's faults. I'd like to think that at this level, we can teach more than just soccer, but leaving a tournament under any circumstance sets a bad example. Come on, even the Russians came back on the ice in '76.

After winning the Ian Pope Tournament last week, Coughlin took first place here as well. The Crusaders are accumulating a lot of pre-season hardware for the trophy case- Are they the team to beat this fall? It seems tough to argue otherwise, but feel free to leave a comment or 2 with your thoughts on the matter.

Give Holy Redeemer some credit, making the playoffs after meeting 2 other playoff-bound teams in the preliminary round. Given that, maybe we'd like to see a victory in the playoff round, but after 5 games in the hot sun- Our boys were spent.

I am not sure if it is as funny as Sal calling Noah Zurad "Nova" all season, but has anyone noticed the new player on the team? Ronnie May?

If you were wondering, the post title is a CSN song. I know that CSN is a few steps backwards in my lifelong project, but it seemed an appropriate for the day- we all got to see the changes to the teams from last season, and after all, the tournament was on the 40th anniversary of one of CSN's biggest performances. There are likely to be some other changes that you will be seeing around the FotoFink site as well- hopefully I'll get to them before the season actually gets started.

Enough blubbering from me-

Here are the pics from the tournament.

Here's the whole shebang.

Enjoy!