@SOURaiders @souwbb

Saturday night and Sunday afternoon will wrap up the home games for the regular season for the SOU basketball teams. Incredibly, neither team has lost at home (Ashland High School). Their combined home record is 20-0. Not that the games haven’t been close. The women had to come from behind to beat Oregon Tech this past Tuesday. The men have turned nearly every game into a nail biter, and they rarely lead at half time.

The men should earn at least one home game in the Cascade Conference playoffs. They have to play conference-leading Northwest Christian on the road so achieving all home playoff games will take some work.

The women should have all home playoff games before the national tournament, where they will likely be a #2 seed.

Posted on February 12th, 2016 under only in ashland, people. Tags: Ashley Claussen, basketball, joel spear, Raider Athletics, sports photography. Comments Off on Regular season home finale weekend

Ashley Claussen

@SOURaiders @souwbb @joelspear

Ashley Claussen was named the Cascade Conference “Player of the Week” for her performance this past weekend. Joel Spear received honorable mention.

Joel Spear

Posted on January 25th, 2016 under only in ashland, people. Tags: Ashley Claussen, basketball, joel spear, Nikon D750, Raider Athletics, sports photography. Comments Off on Players of the Week

David Weider

@SOURaiders @SOU_Football @RaiderVB @RinnieThePoooh

Welcome to installment #21 in “The Whole Picture” in which I present the uncropped, higher resolution versions of photos that SOURaiders.com has published. For prior editions click here. For higher resolution click on the photo before saving. As always, these are best viewed on a big screen rather than a cell phone.

Joel Spear

Corynn Kopra

Teran Togia

Some of you may have found your way here through the link on souraiders.com. I have had several people email me asking questions about buying prints or about finding all of my photos for a certain sport.

The photos I post here are a small fraction of the photos I actually have. If you would like to print any of the photos on this blog, you are welcome to do so at no charge. Be sure to click on the photo to get to the higher resolution size which will print with more quality. If you want to use them on the web (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), you are welcome to do so if you link back to traveljapanblog.com/ashland in the description of the photo. If you are using the photo in a newspaper or magazine, please credit “Al Case, Ashland Daily Photo”.

If you would like me to search through all of my photos and send you photos of the particular athlete you are looking for I charge a reasonable fee for the time it takes me to find all of those photos and to process them for you. I do not normally sell prints. I email you the high quality electronic files in .jpg format, and you can do the printing and framing yourself through a local or online service. My email is on this page or you can comment (leave a reply) to a blog entry to communicate.

To find all of my photos for a particular sport, use the following links. Click on “Older Entries” near the bottom-left of each page to view more photos.
football
basketball
softball
volleyball
soccer
wrestling
track and field

Posted on December 31st, 2015 under people. Tags: basketball, corynn kopra, football, joel spear, Raider Athletics, sports photography, the whole picture, volleyball. Comments: 2

Joel Spear scored a combined 50 points in SOU’s wins

@SOURaiders @joelspear

The Cascade Collegiate Conference announced today that the Southern Oregon University men’s basketball team has been named the “Adidas Team of the Week” for November 30 – December 6.

Details of the victories can be found here and here.

SOU’s next home game (at Ashland High School–a much better venue for photography than old McNeal I might add) will be on 12/30/15.

Posted on December 7th, 2015 under only in ashland, people. Tags: ashland high school, basketball, joel spear, Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II, Nikon D750, Raider Athletics, sports photography. Comments: 1

Joel Spear

@SOURaiders @joelspear

I previously mentioned how Carroll College was going to begin feeding computer rankings to NAIA voting coaches (for men’s basketball) in order to improve the coaches’ poll. That process has begun. You can see the results by comparing the Sagarin Ratings with the latest coaches’ poll.

Unlike the football rankings (in which the coaches will frequently put teams in the top 20–and even the top 10–that Massey Ratings doesn’t have in their top 40), these are fairly close. I’m not sure how much of it has to do with Carroll’s efforts. SOU is ranked #13 by the coaches and #11 by Sagarin.

Posted on December 1st, 2015 under only in ashland, people. Tags: basketball, joel spear, Raider Athletics, sports photography. Comments Off on NAIA Men’s Basketball Rankings

SOU men’s basketball – Joel Spear

@SOURaiders @SOU_WBB @joelspear @CCCSports #MarchMadness

The Southern Oregon men’s basketball team upset #10 Midland University earlier today to move on to the next round of the NAIA Championship Tourney. The SOU women won yesterday. The women will play at 6:30 a.m. PST on Friday (3/13/15), and the men will play at about 11:45 a.m. Details and links to live stats and video here.

As I mentioned before, with a large amount of NAIA teams (and NAIA headquarters) coming out of the middle part of the country, there is bias in the polling against teams not from the Midwest. This is especially true for football, where the Frontier Conference is routinely snubbed, but the CCC is showing this is true for basketball as well. The Cascade Conference is 5-1 in the tournament so far, and even the one loss could have gone the other way.

SOU will be the favorite in both of Friday’s games so hopefully there will be no upsets in the Round of 16. This is the first time both teams have been in the Sweet 16 in school history.

Posted on March 12th, 2015 under only in ashland. Tags: basketball, joel spear, Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II, Nikon D750, Raider Athletics, Southern Oregon University, sports photography. Comments Off on Sweet Sixteen for both SOU teams

SOU men’s basketball – Joel Spear

@SOURaiders @joelspear

In a bizarre twist of fortunes, the Southern Oregon University women’s basketball team, who were seemingly destined for a championship matchup with Eastern, were eliminated by OIT, a team they had dominated twice before this year, for their first loss of the season at home. Meanwhile the men, who were crushed by Warner Pacific twice this season, were huge underdogs on the road going in to tonight’s game. However, the Raiders were victorious, by a wide margin, and will play for the conference championship next week.

Posted on February 28th, 2015 under only in ashland, people. Tags: basketball, joel spear, Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II, Nikon D750, Raider Athletics, Southern Oregon University, sports photography. Comments Off on SOU men advance to finals

2015 SOU Men’s Basketball Team

Good things are happening on the court at Southern Oregon University. Last night the Raiders swept the Geoducks. Be there tonight for the games against Northwest as the #16 women play at 5:30 and the #11 men play at 7:30.

Posted on January 10th, 2015 under only in ashland, people. Tags: basketball, joel spear, Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II, Nikon D750, Raider Athletics, Southern Oregon University, sports photography, tim weber. Comments Off on Raider basketball

SOU Raiders – football and basketball schedules

@SOU_Football @SOURaiders

Posted on October 29th, 2014 under only in ashland. Tags: basketball, football, joel spear, Raider Athletics, sports photography. Comments Off on Big sports weekend