I don't post a lot of sports pictures on our daily featured photo for a few reasons, not all of life is about sports and we like to showcase slices of life and not just action. But I photograph sports nearly every day. When I started shooting sports for The Meadville Tribune 13 years ago I was pretty awful at it. I would turn in pictures that were simply out of focus. I was capturing good things in the frame, but I wasn't nabbing the focus. It took a sit down chat with my photo editor Jim Stefanucci who taught me a great lesson. He said you can have a mediocre picture that is sharp or you can have something you almost captured that isn't sharp. He said the sharp one is always going to be better, more professional and do more for our readers. Then the problem came up--can I do it? I try my best with everything I sink my teeth into so this became my challenge and I finally got it. My sports pictures were sharp. Then I just had to figure out how to get the really good moments in focus too. Admittedly auto focus and digital cameras really helped out too. Even though I was getting good photos in focus by the end of film at our paper, I began getting more and more in focus with digital and the better moments came. I got this picture today and even though I can pick it apart for its flaws, it is a pretty good action shot and one I was glad to get. I got about 5 good shots from todays game, much like this and several others that were sharp and good for the newspaper if these good action shots didn't grab the editors attention or tell the story well enough. Meadville Tribune photo by Richard Sayer