I am woefully behind in my blogging. These next few posts will be relatively short, as I want to get some photos posted.

On Saturday, March 9th, I attended my first ever EWL championships, hosted by George Mason. Ironically, it was the last EWL champsionships, as all seven schools recently announced they have accepted membership into the Mid-American Conference starting next season. What a bittersweet moment.

The Patriots were kind enough to give me a press pass to cover the event, as I have been following them all season (and last season).  This was my first non-baseball press pass!

I was a bit nervous going into the shoot. While I attended one other wrestling tournament, this one was a championship event. Not to mention I recently had to purchase a replacement camera and didn’t get an opportunity to fully test it out ahead of time. I was also worried about changing lenses during the matches, so I rented an extra body, as well as a nice lens. So I had two fully functional Canon cameras going. Turns out I was worried for nothing. And, I made it in FloWrestling! That’s me on the floor of Eagle Bank Arena.

I ended up taking nearly 1,400 photos that day, at an event that began at 10am and wrapped up aftr 9pm. It’s easy to rack up the photo count when you are shooting at up to 6 frames per second! I admit I am still going through them, and will do a better write up later on the event, but wanted to get the first batch of photos up. I focused primarily on the GMU men, but did take photos of nearly every match. It was an exciting event, and I am glad to say I am now a fan of both GMU wrestling and of wrestling as a whole! Thanks to everyone out there (you know who you are) who helped me learn the ropes and answered all of my stupid questions. I’m sure I will have even more!

Photos

As I stated above, these are photos of the GMU team in round 1. I will focus next on the team in round 2, then going into the finals and consolations. Later I will go through the photos of the other teams. There were some great matches, and hopefully these pictures will do them justice!