From my earliest memories, sports, movement, action always played a large part of my life.

Spending my formative years in Texas, football and baseball drove my competitive spirit.

I went to high school in beautiful and historic Munich, Germany. It was here I continued with high school football, picked up downhill ski racing and soccer. I returned to Texas in the summers to play club baseball thinking this sport would be my ticket to collegiate and potentially lead to becoming a professional athlete.

In Germany, however, my athletic mindset began to change and take shape. Realizing I would never reach 5’10”, my focus began to change from football and baseball to ski racing. The epiphany of this change embraced individual sports to complement being a team player.

“If you do it well by yourself, you’ll find it easier to do it with a team,” a coach later told me.

Into my college years at the University of Texas - Arlington, situated between Fort Worth and Dallas, I discovered a new way to compete: Photography, or, more specifically, photojournalism.

Imagine a team consisting of only a dozen athletes. It’s a competition against countless others to earn a spot. The same holds true for becoming a staff photographer on a newspaper staff.

Never one to settle, I found myself triumphant in the workforce battle for a coveted position at four different news organizations: two in Texas, one in Seattle and now in Hawaiʻi.

As my career began to take off, I found myself longing for a return to competitive sports while being behind the camera photographing many different forms of athletics.