Friday morning my friend Chad and I went out to the Saints’ training camp. It was the first time I had ever gone, so I didn’t know how many people would be there, what time, what all to expect. We got there about 8:10, about 5 minutes after the gate opened and easily parked the car. We walked in both bringing our cameras, and picked up a roster sheet. It’s a good idea to give people roster sheets because practice jerseys don’t have names and some of those guys will be cut by the end of the month.
They had concessions out there, so when we saw the smoothie booth giving away free Saints shirts, we both bought a smoothie. It was okay, but nothing special….the shirt though was cool and would come in handy later. As Chad was standing by himself under one of the trees, some guy came up and started talking to him. I walked up and started talking to the guy too. I find it cool that people can talk to random strangers at things like sporting events, but when you walk away, don’t come back. After the guy left, a few minutes later he came back. The conversation just was not the same, and it was awkward. Thankfully he was only there a few minutes.
This was the first time I had really used my camera for anything other than stuff around my house. I left the kit lens at home and just brought my zoom lens and figured that’d be good enough….and it was. There were two fields, and where we sat was along the sidelines of the field farthest from the actual buildings at the practice facility. Rumor was that the team would be practicing on the other field, closest to the buildings, but when the team came out the starters did a walk through on the field in front of us. That was cool, and we got to see the players up close.
THEN the QBs and WRs did some drills right in front of us, so I was getting some great pictures.
They finished doing the passing drills and then went to the other field to do warmups. After the warmups, the kick returners came over to our field and shagged punts. I noticed Reggie Bush was the only guy not to catch a punt, and later read that he was taking practice off, which explained it. He was dressed out though, so whatever.
I got pictures of pretty much all the big names, but my boy Scott Fujita was not at practice, so no photos of him. Jeremy Shockey seemed to chill by sitting on the Gatorade cooler when he was not practicing. Good thing, we don’t want him dehydrating again.
Later in the practice, I decided to drape my head in the tshirt we had gotten and it made a big difference. I was so much cooler. I’m definitely going to do that again should I go back, and I’ll do it from the beginning. No sense in waiting until 10 am to do it.
About 10:15 or so, the team moved to the far field and started running actual plays. The pictures were harder to get since we were so far away, and we couldn’t really see anything anyway. We had been out there about 2.5 hours, and since neither of us were into getting anything autographed, so we left about 10:30. I do want to try to make it back another time this month, because it was a fun time being out there, taking pictures, watching the team up close. The people out there were pretty cool too.