On October 19, I made the drive down to Happy Valley to cover Michigan Football for Maize & Blue Nation.
Even typing this 2 weeks later, it still feels surreal.
With loads of excitement to be covering Michigan sports again came waves and waves of nervousness and self-doubt. I hadn’t shot sports since my senior year at Michigan, would I be able to produce any shots worthy of publishing?
Luckily, Ronnie Bell came to my rescue.
This photo somehow gave me over 1000 Twitter followers in the matter of a few days, and had over 100,000 impressions on a single tweet. This image spread rapidly across the social media platform and I had no idea what to think of the whole situation. The days following the “blow-up” of the photo were spent thanking strangers for their kindness and compliments and also tracking down accounts that had taken my photo without credit (oh, and telling a few people it wasn’t photoshopped).
I was baffled by the amount of support for this photo and my overall work that came through across Twitter and Instagram. As a female sports photographer, I often have (and still do) experience sexism from other photographers and athletics staffers. I also often face bouts of self-doubt, but this was certainly uplifting and validated my place on the field.
Below are a few more photos from the game.
