i drink smartwater

My sister’s OM team is competing in the World Finals on the Iowa State campus. This will be Fayetteville’s fifth straight year (I think? I lost count) to make it to the World Finals.

By Andy Shupe

Mia Bautista, a junior at Fayetteville High School and member of the school’s tennis team, returns a shot during practice at the newly constructed tennis facility near Asbell Elementary School and Lady Dawg Yard, the school’s softball facility. The eight-court tennis facility will serve the school’s 40-plus tennis athletes and were constructed after the FHS tennis courts were demolished to make room for the current expansion project at the high school. The team spent the previous season paying for the use of the courts at Fayetteville Athletic Club and Wilson Park. The project cost $737,786 with the Fayetteville Board of Education approving an additional $473,357 for the construction of a 2,200-square foot tennis dressing room and coaches offices adjacent to the courts.

It’s tough to get an interesting photo — interesting enough for the front page, at least — of a person playing tennis and still get one that shows enough of the new facility to serve the purpose of running it in the first place. When I saw the purple courts, I knew I wanted to use as much of them as I could. Bautista’s spiffy new tennis outfit was perfect because it didn’t introduce another color into the frame. The yellow-green ball, well, that’s a great complement to the purple. The result doesn’t look like an action photo from a tennis match, but doesn’t look like a boring photo of a tennis facility. Hopefully, this strikes somewhere between the two; more of a sort of graphic design than anything else. I like it.

My sister is such a baller.