July 30, 2007 Update continued...

I've always wanted to cover a rodeo, but never had the chance, until this past Saturday. I noticed a listing for a rodeo put on by the Hawaii Women's Rodeo Association at the DK Ranch in Waimonalo. It was as much fun as I thought it would be and I hope to do more rodeos in the future. The women have a very nice website with lots of information, but I haven't found anything on the men's side. Please send me information if you have it. The photo galleries can be found here. Here's a few photos from the barrel racing competion.






















It was then over to the CORP pool to cover the Aloha State Games swim meet. This meet really grew over last year's. A few photos from the meet follow. To reach the full gallery, please click
here.

July 30, 2007 Update

The last 2 weeks have been different from my usual hectic pace. I still covered quite a few events, though, and had a lot of fun doing them.

First, it was the Hawaii International Cup Soccer tournament held at Waipio, sponsored by the Honolulu Bulls. The photo galleries can be found here. The tournament ran from a Thursday through Sunday. We were there Thursday, Friday and Sunday.

On Saturday, the summer track Relay Championships were held at Punahou School. It rained constantly. The kids didn't seem to mind the rain that much, but I did. Ugh... The track and field galleries for the whole summer can be found here.

The next week, it was the Aloha International Cup Soccer Tournament. This is another big soocer tournament held at Waipio, this time sponsored by Leahi. Photo galleries can be reached through this link.



Again, we couldn't stay the whole time at the soccer tournament because of another track meet, this time the Aloha State Games Track and Field Meet.


One thing that is really nice about the Aloha State Games track meet is there are some events that we don't see very often, namely javelin and hammer throw. I only get to see the javelin a few times a year, during the girls' heptathlon and the boys' decathlon, in addition to the Aloha State Games. But, the hammer throw has only been once a year, at this meet. Here's a photo of one of our few hammer throwers.

2007 Hawaii International Cup Soccer

This summer has been quite varied so far. Some Iolani baseball, some Iolani basketball (boys and girls), a lot of USATF summer track meets, the Aloha State Games diving meet, the Keo Nakama swim meet, and the just completed Hawaii International Cup Soccer Tournament.

The HIC games either myself or my assistant covered were:

Thursday:

U11 Girls Bulls Red vs Ka-oi Cobras
U17 Girls Abbotsford Hurricanes vs Skovlunde IF
U19 Girls Bulls vs Ka'oi Laulina
U12 Boys Black vs Kona Heat
U12 Girls Ha'aheo vs Real Hawaii

Friday:

U12 Boys Bulls Black vs Bulls White
U12 Girls So Cal Blues vs Ha'aheo
U14 Boys Honolulu Bulls vs Hawaii Rush B94 Nike
U11 Girls Honolulu Bulls Red vs Hawaii Rush
U17 Girls Abbotsford Hurricanes vs Real Hawaii

Sunday:

U16 Boys Bulls Red vs LJSA
U11 Girls Bulls Red vs Real Hawaii
U14 Boys Motiv-8 vs Hawaii Rush B94 Nike

On Saturday, we covered the USATF Relay Championships in Track and Field.

I will probably be covering some Aloha Cup soccer games. If you have interest in me covering your team, please email me.

All photos can be reached from my smugmug galleries. Please email me if you have any questions about my photos, collages or posters, or anything else about my business.

So, where have you been?

Hi all,

I know I've been terribly negligent in posting to this blog. Hey, it's not like I've been lazy! But, yeah, I know there are a lot of you that want me to keep the blog up-to-date, and I really would like to also.

Doing the State Championships was really fun, but I really got tired by the end. I looked at the Track and Field Championships as the biggest event of the year for me and, ugh, I got sick. It might not have been so hard except that I had just done a bunch of State Championships right before it, girls basketball, baseball and girls water polo! I felt it coming as I stepped off the plane in Maui. I still enjoyed the meet tremendously, but it would have been much nicer doing it healthy.

Then I had so many orders for collages and posters to complete that I've been working straight out (with my daughter) to complete them all. The backlog is almost whittled down now, enough so I felt I could write a bit on the blog.

I've had quite a few requests to give my predictions for the top 20 in cross-country this year. I don't really know the boys well enough, and in most cases, I feel I know the girls too well, at least a bunch of them. I'm just not unbiased enough to do it and I'm in trouble no matter what I do. The Iolani team potentially has quite a few girls that will be top 20 this year. I just can't rate them. If I rate them high, everyone says I'm just biased. If I rate them low then they might be upset with me. So, I'm going to take the coward's way out and say, you want a top 20 list? Either send it to me in an email and I'll collate it with everyone else's or you can just post it on this blog. It must be reasonable, though, or I will ignore it.

I just added a new page to the USATF website displaying the home page photos from the summer track meets. I will continue this practice into the future. I may even go back to last year's meets, but I'm not promising anything.

One other thing, I get quite a few comments on what I do. Almost everyone of them is complimentary. I did get one a few weeks ago from an anonymous emailer (he/she used one of those websites that allow you to send an anonymous email) who felt I didn't give Punahou enough photographic space on the State Championship Track and Field pages. Since I couldn't answer the email because this person didn't have enough guts to sign his name, I'll answer it here. I cover Punahou all through the ILH season. They are the largest team we compete against and I think you'll find that if you go through my USATF website there are many more Punahou athletes than any other team, probably more than every other team combined, for that matter. Going to States finally gave me a good chance to see the athletes from the outer islands and other leagues. So, I tried to feature the athletes that I don't see every week.

In the future, I won't even acknowledge emails where the writer won't sign their name.

That's all for now.

Al