My Favorite Purdue Sports Photos From The 2022-2023 School Year

This was a weird year for me working around Purdue sports. Passes were much harder to come by even when working for the other team. With that being said the amount of games that I attended was far fewer than it has been in years. This used to be a very fun list to put together. This year the memories around Purdue are not quite as fuzzy as they have been in years past. The good news about not being at very many events is that it makes putting this list together much easier than it has been in the past.

My First event of the school year as usual was the opening soccer game. With some good light I decided to head down to Folk Field to make a photo. This was my favorite of those photos that night.

This year I only attended a few Purdue volleyball matches. I love the emotion of volleyball. In the fall you are usually far away from the action in soccer and football so being able to be close to emotion with no facemarks is a great thing. This was one of my favorite photos from the opening volleyball match of the season.

The first football game this year was a tough one. I quickly found out that I don’t like sitting in the stands anymore. It was weird that my photo was on the game shirt, but I couldn’t get a pass into the game. The good news out of all of that though was that this was one of my best selling images of last year. I used to have to include these as part of what I photographed, but with just being a fan I could market and sell it. I made more off of this image than I used to make for making photos the entire season. If you want a copy you can click on the image to go to my SmugMug page and get a copy for yourself. With all of the renovations going on around Ross Ade it is the last chance for an image like this.

Fall Ball is a fun time to make some photos in a different light than you get in the spring. Here I had some fun with the light late in a game.

Fall Ball is a fun time to make images that you don’t normally get to make. Here I copied an image that I made earlier when my daughter was at the Coach Boo softball camp. I only was able to make a doubleheader in the fall, but it was a fun day making photos.

Being around college athletes I always thought that my main job was to show the fans who they were. Kiara Dillon played just down the road at Harrison in high school, and here had some fun while playing on her birthday. These are the fun photos to make.

I love making photos in this tunnel before the Purdue volleyball matches. The crowd is eagerly awaiting the team, but they have one last moment with each other before that happens. I wanted to make one more photo in this tunnel while I could.

This is a photo that I could never have made in the past. I was always attached to the coin toss so I had to be up with the captains and ready to make and image. This year in my limited time I was able to go and find photos around the field. It was nice having that freedom for the first time in a while.

The final football game of the year I took a little time at the end to take it all in. You never know when your last game will be so I have always tried to take it all in. As I was doing that I saw Payne Durham doing the same thing. Payne though knew that this was his last time at Ross Ade. This was a fun photo to make of a great tight end.

I was only credentialed for one basketball this season, but it was nice to get to photograph Zach Edey up close. Here are a couple of favorites from the t-shirt game.

Towards the end of the women’s basketball season I finally got my season credential. I went to every game that I could once that happened. This team with Katie Gearlds at the helm is a fun one, and I really wanted to photograph them. Here are a couple of photos that I liked from those last couple of games.

If I could only go to one game this year the t-shirt game was a pretty good one to attend. I have photographed every one, and with the new camera rules that Purdue has put into place I couldn’t bring my wide into the game to make this photo. Here Mackey looks pretty good before the fans came in to claim their shirts.

This year something happened that hasn’t happened since I went to school here. If you are keeping score at home that was a long time ago. Purdue sold out Mackey Arena for a women’s game. I wanted to make a special photo for the occasion. Here things worked out for that photo.

This year one of the last events on campus for me was the Big Ten Tennis Championships. Here Liz Norman of Purdue celebrates a big point.

This year the Purdue baseball schedule always seemed to conflict with other work. I was able to get out to a few games though. Here are a few favorites from what I could get to this season. This might be the fewest games that I have attended in the Alexander Field era. I always enjoy my time there, and I need to try to get to more games next year.

 

This year I think that I called the Purdue sports year weird in just about every post that I made. For the past decade prior I was given passes to events in exchange for photos. Even when I started working with them more closely I still gave away far more photos than I charged for. This year for some reason my passes were cut off  for the major sports. This was threatened to me the year prior, but I had hoped that it wouldn’t happen. It is amazing just how quickly things can go from good to where we are now. That is too bad. I had so much fun making photos for the school, and I loved doing it. I didn’t realize until I made this list just how few games I attended at Purdue this year. Hopefully next year this list can be a little bigger than this. I am working on a way to get into more games right now.