@Dave That's a good set if it's your first. My first football pics were atrocious and my first hockey pics even worse!

Having shot a lot of sports the temptation is always to focus on the "money shot" that you'd see on the cover of SI. All your shots are in the act of shooting (and you do need some of those shots). However, you can often get more drama from facial expressions on the grunt plays - scrambling for a loose ball or the look on a defender's face when the guard does a crossover and the defender's knees break. When I shot my son's football games I'd always get a shot or two of the boys running the ball. But after that I'd focus on one position for a given play and just be ready to snap a shot if anything interesting happened. Looking back on the season the shots the parents loved best were not the breakaways but of their son grimacing in total concentration and effort to block a guy, etc.

Children's sports are often great if you focus on the team that's down. The team that just got scored on, etc. At the end of the game it may be no fun to shoot those expressions but in the middle of the game it's neat to see the kids are really down but they're trying so hard to ignore it. By college and certainly the pros most athletes have become hardened and just know it's time to go back to work most of the time.