I have always loved photographing high school sports. The biggest reason: access.

One of my favorite examples of access goes back to my early days in Indiana. I covered the state basketball championship run of Tecumseh High School. I’d spent quite a bit of time covering the team leading up to the game. This proved valuable when I overheard a conversation about a pre-season bet made between one of the players and his grandfather. The grandfather had promised to shave his head bald and paint it red (the school colors) for the championship game if his grandson’s team was to make it to the championship.

The grandfather proudly allowed his wife to shave his head and paint it bright red when Tecumseh won the championship–and readers of the Evansville Courier were treated to an unexpected picture. I think it told more about the story of this southern Indiana basketball community than any action photos could. (Note: This is where my ss.com icon came from)

It’s pretty easy to tell a compelling story about sports when you are actually allowed to witness those stories from beginning to end, with access to the key players.

Portland currently has one major professional team, the Portland Trail Blazers. Each season since moving to Portland in 2000, I have been assigned a handful of games each season. The games were assigned to the photographer working the night shift on game day. For the first several years, I would request for some sort of behind-the-scenes access from the team, but was denied. I tried asking over and over and was met with the same response: No.

I wanted to change that answer. The approach I decided on would take an investment of both time and a little money.

Below is an excerpt from a letter I sent to the GM and VP of basketball operations for the Blazers.

It is difficult to tell you exactly what I would photograph since I have never been allowed the kind of access I’m requesting. I imagine wanting to photograph pre-game rituals, players volunteering in the community or just relaxing between games on the team plane. My experience tells me that the best moments cannot be planned. It will just take an investment of time on my part and trust on your part.

The readers of the Oregonian do not learn much about the team’s culture with the coverage we currently offer. In our photo selection, we try to offer the readers a report of the game. This often comes with an action picture. Even the best action pictures, in time, lose their relevance. Look at any action picture from the Blazers 1977 championship game and compare it with the images all of Portland remembers. It isn’t the action people remember, it’s the images off the court. The parade, the celebration and emotional reactions are the images that we all remember. Imagine the public’s fervor if they were able to see the types of photographs I could make with greater access to the team.

I recognized that the biggest problem was that nobody knew who I was. I had photographed hundreds of Blazer basketball games. I worked hard and did a fine job, but to the organization, I was just another face on the sideline. The players didn’t know me and the management didn’t know me–why would they care about what I wanted?

This needed to change. I came up with three approaches I would try to make this happen.

1. Increase time around the team

The first thing I did was explain my goal to my editors. We have two Blazer beat writers, why not a Blazer beat photographer? So over the past two seasons, I have been the primary photographer for the Oregonian’s coverage of the Portland Trail Blazers. I photographed about 50 Blazer games each season. That alone has helped. I am a familiar face at the games and some practices. That helped me forge a good relationship with the PR staff, but not much more.

The bigger problem is that I am behind a camera. The writers have great relationships with the players and spend hours throughout a season talking with those players, as well as the coaches and managers. I never talked to them; I had no reason to. I also lack that charming Rod Mar personality that can open doors on its own.

I show up early. I stay late. Fifty-three times since October, I claimed my spot on the floor to document the games. This is what is expected of my job at the newspaper. Although I found some nice images by going early and late, I have found this time valuable to get to know the many faces that go into the game: security guards, equipment managers, coaches, and fans.

In addition to the games, I try to attend community events that the newspaper would not otherwise cover. Players are required to makes appearances at community events throughout the season. I’ve found these events offer a little behind-the-scenes access. These are scripted events, but they often do go off script. At one particular event to promote reading, Dante Cunningham and Brandon Roy were supposed to cheer and coach as two students at a local elementary school competed in a tricycle race in the school gym. Cunningham and Roy couldn’t resist. They jumped on the trikes and raced each other. It was a real moment and more telling of these athletes’ personalities than any jump shot photograph.

2. Get face time

After my first full season as the beat photographer, I used Aperture to assemble a book. I carefully edited the book to highlight the pictures that captured images beyond the typical action shots. With the support of the newspaper, I made a handful of copies to give to the major players within the organization.

I set up appointments with each person and hand-delivered each book. This provided an opportunity for face time. I sat in the office of the team’s president, coach, general manager, and vice president of basketball operations and presented each of them a book. I also gave copies to the players on the team that I knew had influence within the organization.

These meetings varied in success. Each time, I emphasized my goal, which was simply to get away from the standard action way we covered the team to a way that showed the culture of the team. I wasn’t pushy. I didn’t ask for anything. I just wanted to let them know who I was and what I valued.

3. Showcase my work

One of these meetings spurred a conversation with GM Kevin Pritchard. He and others within management wanted a “hustle wall,” pictures to display in their practice facility that showed the players hustling. I agreed to provide them with files they could print, but I wanted something in exchange. I suggested that I be given display space in the team’s training room at the Rose Garden, where the players hang out before each home game. I wanted to hang a gallery of my pictures throughout this season.

This idea came from Bryan Moss, my former boss in Evansville, IN. He documented and published a book about a 1992 graduating class at a California high school. I recall him telling me that the kids were not opening up and were uncomfortable as he wandered the halls of their school. He started a gallery of prints in the hallway of the school and changed the pictures each week. It became a huge hit with the students. They began to open up, hoping that their picture would end up in the gallery.

At the beginning of the 2010 Trail Blazers season, the team arranged for a gallery of six images. Throughout the season, I changed out the 13×19’’ prints every other game. There was usually a theme to the edit. The pictures that the players appreciated most were ones that included their families. I had a couple of complaints over the season, but I was just fine with that. I knew they were looking and it caused conversation, and that’s really what I wanted–a conversation.

Of course the response from wealthy NBA players has been very different from Bryan’s high schoolers. There haven’t been any requests from the players to get them into the gallery. I do think they enjoy it just as much, though.

This Blazers’ season will be defined by the injuries suffered by the team. The players have missed a combined 311 games due to injuries this season. One of the most traumatic injuries was when Center Greg Oden’s season ended abruptly as he fell to the court after his patella (knee) broke in half. He was carried off the floor on a stretcher. I went to the hallway and waited to photograph the injured player being wheeled down the long corridor to the team’s locker room.

This was when I knew things were changing. In the past, I am sure someone would have been upset that “the media” was back there and I would have been asked to leave. But that didn’t happen. In fact, a really nice moment happened next and I was there to photograph it. The team’s chaplain came around the corner and met the doctors and Oden in the hallway. While chaplain All Egg prayed with Oden for a minute, I quietly snapped one frame and respected the moment. Then they were gone, headed for an x-ray.

I was curious if there would be any fallout from the Oregonian publishing the behind-the-scenes moment. It worried me that someone on the PR staff would get in trouble for allowing me to stay back there. I didn’t hear much, only that the team wanted to order two large prints of the picture.

This process is all about trust. Now that I am a familiar face and as they become more comfortable with having me around, I’m very excited to see where this takes me.

There is a short list of famous photographers getting behind-the-scenes access in the big leagues that most of us can only dream of. Walter Iooss’ work with Michael Jordan is one of the reasons I am in the business. There are other photographers out there who have better access and better pictures of the NBA world, but this is my reality. I’m not Walter Iooss. I’m not a team photographer. I’m a journalist at a newspaper. The door has been closed for a long time and I am doing what I can to crack it open a bit.

We went to the General Hospital to see the delivery of food biscuits by Mercy Corps to the families staying there. The shipment ended up being delayed, so just did a story about the scene there.

I was given permission by the patient and nurses to photograph a birth that was taking place. It was going well until other photographers showed up and started getting in the way. I could see it was going to become a problem, and sure enough it was. One TV reporter jumped in and stuck a microphone in the face of the doctor even though the doctor was clearly busy. At this point I knew it was time to go. I said thank you and headed on my way.

The other visit we made with Mercy Corps was to a small community as the they assessed the water conditions in the area.

Providing clean water a priority for Mercy Corps in Haiti

The 7.0 earthquake snatched some of their best and brightest, says Monsieur Claude, as he is called by the 300 mostly-barefoot children here and another 520 adults. Fissures split the walls of some huts. More than a dozen are so damaged that residents have strung cloth to broken tree limbs pounded into rocky ground to fashion crude shelters. Claude needs international humanitarian aid groups like Mercy Corps to first help rebuild and then transform.

His test confirms the water isn’t potable. Claude says the well has always been used for washing and was not damaged in the temblor. In the world of emergency humanitarian assistance, the largest well in a slum of 800 won’t be reborn as a source of safe drinking water because it wasn’t safe before the earthquake.

It was a great way to end our coverage in Haiti. The most memorable moment of the trip for me would come from our caravan through the streets of downtown Port-au-Prince. As the as the 7 vans filled with more than 80 children rolled through town with the windows down, they were singing songs – and although they were singing in french, they were all familiar tunes. Many of the people on the streets that were standing amongst the rubble and it was a touching moment as many of them stopped and turned their heads to see where the music was coming from. It was a bit of beauty amongst massive amounts of destruction.

Joel Battistoni of Stevenson comforts Boyce Fish, of Dayton OH after the team moved 6 courpses into the morgue that they were asked to help establish at the Hotel Montana. CLICK IMAGE FOR SLIDESHOW

I think our new editor at The Oregonian Peter Bhatia summed up things pretty well as to why our newspaper would send reporters to Haiti …

The effort to get Kimberly and Bruce to Haiti was well-rewarded by their great work. But why send them in the first place, in a time of tight budgets? Simple: When big news breaks and there is a local angle and context for us to pursue (as clearly there was time and time again in Haiti) we still have the resources and the ambition to go. The latter is what really matters. With all we have endured, this is still a big-time staff with big-time talent. If there are stories that meet the test of local relevance, we’ll still go get them. – Peter Bhatia, editor of The Oregonian

In the days and weeks since the earthquake, much has been made of who should go to Haiti and who should not. Our mission was simple. We were there to tell the stories that related to our readership. There were plenty and much more talented photographers there covering the big picture. While it was tempting to photograph the aftermath like the NYT, LA Times and Miami Herald … it was just not our place to do so. While there will be no pulitzer for the Oregonian – nobody else was there telling the stories related to our community. Thats what we were there to do. I also think we did it in a responsible way. We were able to bring every bit of water and food that we would need while in country. At no point did we use a resource that was intended for locals or aid workers.

Oregonian writer Kimberly Wilson and I headed out the door without much of a plan. We had one way tickets to Florida and the rest was up to us.

There was a small chance that we would be able to hitch a ride to Port-au-Prince with a local NGO, Medical Teams International, that had chartered a flight. That fell apart when the doctors were actually forced to leave behind some of their bags due to the lack of space. Definitely no room for a couple reporters. We were now stuck in Ft. Lauderdale with no plan.

After another full day in Florida, we ended up buying tickets to the Dominican Republic. While on the plane, the gentleman behind me was talking about renting a helicopter to fly into Haiti. I of course asked if we could hitch a ride. He said “no problem, assuming there is room.” During the flight we continued our conversation. Turns out he and a group of folks from Ohio were headed there to find a man that was missing at the Hotel Montana after the quake.

Small world … turns out the guy they were going to look for was from Washougal, Washington (near Portland). The missing person, Walt Ratterman, is a member of a small NGO called Knightsbridge International and the man sitting behind me, Dr. Laws, is the president of the organization.

So, we ended up joining with them and reporting on their efforts to search for Walt Ratterman.

Dr. Laws secured our group a large tour bus to use for 5 days. We just had one stop to make before making the 8 hour drive into Haiti. The bus pulled up to a grocery store and Dr. Laws nearly emptied to shelves of bottled water — about 800 gallons of drinking water. It was loaded into the luggage area of the bus where it would not be seen. We would all agree not to talk about our cargo to anyone. Not even people on the ground we trusted. We would be driving through Port-au-Prince in a very large green tour bus loaded with very valuable water. It would be a huge security problem if anyone knew what we had.

The water was going to be delivered to the rescue workers at the Hotel Montana. The group not only wanted the searchers to be comfortable so they would continue the search, but Dr. Laws also saw it as an opportunity to “buy” his way onto the hotel compound. The gates were locked, but the water opened them. He was right. Within hours or delivering the water, Dr. Laws and his crew were sitting at planning meetings and were now in charge of establishing a morgue at the site.

All images © 2010 The Oregonian
Any unauthorized use is illegal

They will be gone from home for almost 23 hours, travel 552 miles and cross into a different time zone. They will ride from middle Oregon to the Idaho border where they will drop a 40-28 heartbreaker to the Jordan Valley Mustangs.

The football team is not alone though. The girls volleyball matches are scheduled at the same time, so schools can save on expenses. Everyone rides the same bus.

That means on travel days that 28 of the 39(need to cq this) students from Mitchell High School are on the bus. And for some of them, like Freshman Dalton (name to come) it’ll be the first time he’s ever been to Burns or Jordan Valley.

Dalton started the morning with $14.00. Money his mother gave him for the two meals the team would eat along the way, but he won another dollar from his older brother Colton by taking a full breath into Colton’s open shoe.

Dalton says the smell nearly turned his stomach but he pocketed the bill, looking forward to the teams stop at McDonalds on the way home. The brothers sat together for some of the trip, exchanging thoughts about what they could see from their window; the absence of trees, the probability of snakes, the happiness a cowboy might find in the geography.

Sports can become an effort all over Oregon’s east side where schools like Mitchell often have to combine with a nearby school to have enough players for a football team. And once they get a team, they often travel long distances just to get a game.

For the past several years, Mitchell and Spray, communities separated by 36 crooked miles along highway 207 in Wheeler County, have combined because neither have been sure of enough players to have their own eight-man football team. Now they come together as the Mitchell-Spray Logger-Eagles. Spray wears the red helmets, Mitchell the blue helmets, but otherwise they dress as one team.

So for away games, like the one in Jordan Valley this past Friday, the Mitchell football and volleyball teams load up on one bus, which departs from their school, and the Spray teams do the same.

At the destination the boys combine to form the Logger-Eagles. The Mitchell girls play as the Loggers and the Spray girls play as the Eagles. All of them play against Jordan Valley.

The games are important, the kids will tell you that, but the long bus rides are part of the social fabric of living in a town like Mitchell. You might think it unlikely that most of any student body could load up on one school bus, but on Oregon’s east side it’s more common than you might think.

Week 5 | Crane

CRANE – For as long as anyone here can remember, kids have trudged up the mountain to tend to the large white letter C that stands for Crane High School. They call it C-Day and nearly everyone who has gone to school at Crane has a remembered tale about whitewashing the rock letter. Freshmen, of course, haul the paint, seniors bark instructions and everybody contributes to the annual tradition. But it’s the freshmen who get doused in smurf-blue. And Friday afternoon, as alumni turn down the gravel road for the homecoming football game, they glance up at the “C,” checking it, taking comfort in a Mustang tradition.

Week 4 | Heppner

HEPPNER – Chances are that sometime during your sporting life the word F-U-N has been tossed at you, perhaps when you least appreciated it. Something like this is supposed to be FUN, or it’s not about winning, it’s about having FUN. Well, out in Heppner they practice winning; the Mustang football team has not lost a conference game in something like a decade. But they also practice FUN. They are good at that too. Come on, wouldn’t you love an excuse to belly dive into a pit of oozing cold mud, scream past a blazing bonfire or hand paint the family car for a parade. They do all this and more in Heppner where Friday night football is a town tradition.

Week 3 | Astoria

ASTORIA – The band was done playing, the grandstand empty, but over on the practice field, in the dark, crisp coastal air, a party was just beginning. It’s this way after an Astoria High School football victory, time for the Fishermen celebration dance. The defending Class 4A champion defeated Estacada 47-30 last Friday, so the team finished the night with rituals that come with a win. Players hauled injured teammates in their arms, circled up together and honored one another for the effort. Then they danced and dived into the damp grass absorbing another victory.

Week 2 | Santiam Christian

CORVALLIS – Just like every one of his teammates, Santiam Christian team captain Matt Scruggs stood up and read his commitment aloud to the group before passing a note card with his promise to another player.

“Commitments, guys, that’s what separates us from everybody else,” explains coach Dave Langes. “When you get up and you make that commitment to the team, that’s what family is. The only thing you have to fear is letting the guy next to you down.”

A knee injury kept Scruggs from fulfilling his commitment to force three turnovers in their loss against Dayton. “Obviously, I wasn’t able to do it, but it fuels you for next week,” says Scruggs.

Week 1 | Unity

UNITY, OREGON – Wayne Wise has never coached football. In fact, he hasn’t picked up a football in 34 years. Six of his eight players are foreign exchange students who have never played the game. His quarterback, from Taiwan, is affectionately called Harry, because few including us can pronounce his given name. It’s 90 degrees, there’s no shade, and no substitutes.

Wise knew all this was coming, and still agreed to coach The Burnt River Bulls eight-man football team this season. He did it for one reason; he wanted the kids in Unity to have the same experience as others across Oregon. He wanted them to have the opportunity to play football.

Fielding a team at Burnt River is often a challenge. The K-12 school southwest of Baker City is too remote to combine with other schools as some in their league.

I started the day in an airplane where I photographed the stadium at dusk. It was a 6 pm game and we had to clear the airspace at 5 pm due to FAA regulations. Plenty of time to land and get back to the stadium for kickoff.

Jamie Francis and I teamed up to collect pictures and audio from the game. We put all the pieces in the talented hands of Rob Finch and here is what we all came up with … Civil War audio slideshow