I don’t often find myself in firsts situations, but when I do, I try to make a special note of it. Tonight, I found myself at the Catawba County Sports Hall of Fame Banquet for the local newspaper. My first in this case was a set of photos of Jennifer Howard Wolgemuth. Jennifer is the first female to be inducted into the Catawba County Sports Hall of Fame. I’m fairly confident that she’s also the youngest person to be inducted as well. Here’s the biography that was printed in the program:

Jennifer Howard Wolgemuth

Jennifer Howard Wolgemuth won two national Elks Club foul-shooting contests while in grade school and went on to score 2,054 points during her career at Fred T. Foard High School. Those achievements helped to earn her recognition as a Kodak All-American and a six-time AAU All-American. During her junior year, she helped lead Foard to a 29-1 season and the 3A state basketball championship.

In addition, she was all-conference for four years in tennis and also ran track. As an outstanding student athlete at N.C. State, she was named second team All-ACC team twice and set a conference record for career foul shots and her three point average of 44 percent remains a conference record.

In 1997, she was awarded the Frances Naismith Award for a player 5′6″ or smaller and is enshrined into the National Basketball Hall of Fame as a recipient of this honor. In addition, her basketball jersey was retired and displayed in the gym at Fred T. Foard High School.

An Academic All-American with a 4.0 grade point average both in high school and college, Jennifer played one year of pro basketball with the Cleveland Rockers.

A resident of the Vale community, she and her husband, Wade, have two children.

After the 2007 Major League Baseball draft, Caldwell County’s Madison Bumgarner will be in Hickory this week. He won’t be carrying a bat though. Madison will be in the pitching rotation for the Augusta GreenJackets in this week’s series in Hickory against the Hickory Crawdads. Madison is scheduled to pitch in Thursday night’s game at L.P. Frans Stadium. It will be interesting to see what sort of crowd shows up at the game on Thursday night. I’m expecting a larger base of fans for Bumgarner than for the Hickory Crawdads :)

Welcome back Madison!

Milestones are always fun to note. Today provided an interesting opportunity for another entry into the My Town collection as a new milestone was set by the Hickory Crawdads at L.P. Frans Stadium. The Hickory Crawdads started play in the South Atlantic League in 1993 as a single-A farm club of the Chicago White Sox. They are now a single-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today’s game against the Lexington Legends (single-A affiliate of the Houston Astros) was the 14th game of the 16th season, and during today’s game, Hickory first baseman Miles Durham scored the team’s 10,000th run.

During the bottom of the sixth inning, Miles Durham doubled on a line drive into right field. The next batter to the plate, Erik Huber, reaches on a fielding error and Miles Durham advanced to third base. Hickory’s Andrew Walker grounds out to Lexington’s shortstop, but Miles Durham scored on the play to bring Hickory to the 10,000 runs scored mark.

Hickory lost the game by a score of 5-4, but the milestone was still fun to witness!

I wonder how the infield dirt tastes? I didn’t stick around to ask. I wanted to get home in time to watch the NCAA finals.

I was sitting in the dugout before the start of a local high school tournament game Tuesday evening… just going over some assignment notes and collecting my thoughts before game time. I wasn’t really paying much attention to what was going on around me until I noticed this young man in the dugout with me. For some reason, he caught my attention. He was probably the son of a coach, or maybe a little brother of one of the team members. He was dressed out in his baseball uniform just like the rest of the team. I grabbed my camera and snapped this photo of him standing behind the dugout fence watching the team warm up on the field. Then I started thinking…

This kid is the reason professional baseball exists. He’s the fan. He’s gonna play little league baseball while he’s watching his favorite pros on TV. He’s also gonna buy replica jerseys with Pujols or Jeter written on the back one day… He doesn’t know what a salary cap is… or Rule 5… or Tommy John surgery… or about owners and middle management. What he does know is who autographed his baseball cards… who shook his hand…

Who knows…

It was just intriguing to watch him and then write my own story about what may be going through his mind…

The Hickory Crawdads held some try-outs for National Anthem singers for the upcoming baseball season as part of National Goof Off Day at the park this afternoon…. Below is some video from that event…

I’m starting to feel the itch again… Minor League Baseball here in Hickory kicks off on Thursday, April 3rd, which is less than two weeks away. I’m going to be spending most of the day on Saturday at the stadium for “National Goof Off Day” with my camera and camcorder. There should be some fun photo opportunities and it will give me a chance to meet some of the new faces in the Hickory Crawdads organization.

I went to the stadium Friday afternoon to meet Mike Janela, the new director of broadcasting and media relations. He’s new in the organization and he won’t be around on Saturday, so I took the opportunity to meet him prior to the start of the season. We spent a little time talking about what he wants this coming season as far as images are concerned, and it seems like the organization may want to make more use of photos this year than they have in the past, so I’m happy about that too.

Of all the sports I photograph, baseball is one of my two favorites. I enjoy being outside at these games between the first of April and the first of September. The Hickory Crawdads have 70 home games this season, and I expect to attend at least 55 of them, and also go to a few games on the road. I’ll be doing my regular routine of providing images for the club for publicity as well as making the team’s baseball card photos for the season.

Another fun project I do during baseball season is another blog around this team’s activities. I don’t post much in this blog about baseball or sports in general, but my Crawdads Blog will contain a lot of information and images again this season. Since I picked up a cheap camcorder back in December, I’ll probably be posting occasional video clips from these events as well. I do plan to shoot some interesting video on Saturday, so check back for that…

High school baseball season is rolling, and it’s renewing my hunger for the minor league season that starts up during the first week of April. I was in the dugout at a local high school game this evening and decided to look around for some type of photo opportunity that speaks of the season opening. This bag of weathered baseballs partially open with a few faces shining through seemed like a good image to go along with the idea.

This image also shows bias from the photographer ;)

The Hickory High Lady Tornadoes varsity basketball team is on it’s way to another run for the state championship.  I’ll have to admit that the Lady Tornadoes didn’t look their best tonight against the Lady Bears of Bunker Hill.  Three of Hickory’s starters were in foul trouble, and Karsyn Jarrett ended up on the bench with five with just under two minutes to play.  Bunker Hill’s Kellie Rhoney also reached the foul limit before the end of play.  Tonight was one of the first times this season that Hickory’s full-court press wasn’t particularly effective.  Hickory didn’t produce the number of turnovers that they normally do, and they actually trailed Bunker Hill by two points at the end of the first period.  I think it was just an off night for Hickory.  Hickory won the game, but not by the margin they are used to.  The Lady Tornadoes are still undefeated this season and will compete in the conference finals on Friday night…

This is another installment in the “Art of the Game” series.  I’m still out here searching for out-of-the-ordinary images from sporting events.  I was sent out to shoot a feature on a local swimmer this afternoon, and I wanted to add something else to this series, because I don’t shoot swimming very often.  Almost every time I shoot swimming for action, I’m looking for the standard photos where I can see a face, such as the head-on butterfly stroke or a side view of the breast stroke.  This particular image was when the swimmer was just about to emerge from underwater on a backstroke run. 

I’m starting to enjoy this series quite a bit if I can keep it going.  I would like to round out the collection with at least 25 images over the course of this calendar year.  I’m currently in basketball and wrestling season, but I haven’t spotted a wrestling scene yet that inspired an image for this series.  I’m probably going to be shooting wrestling again this coming Friday, so I may look a little harder for something from that sport that can find its way into this collection…

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