A few weeks ago I argued that Houston is becoming the volleyball capital of the South. Here is the proof: more than twenty greater-Houston girls signed NCAA Division I volleyball letters in the Class of 2026, from Stanford and Nebraska to the Ivy League. These are seventeen of them I had the chance to photograph this season, and where they are headed next.
Read the story →I want you to try something. Open the Instagram page of any high school sports program. Then open another one. Then a third. You already know what you are going to see. Score graphics in the school colors. Highlight reels cut to a trending audio track. The team photo taken on picture day. The "Congratulations to our seniors" post in May.
There's a particular quiet that settles into the volleyball calendar in the last week of May, and it's the quiet of a season getting ready to begin a different season. The college players are home. The MLV trophy is in Dallas. The LOVB gyms are dark for the offseason. And somewhere on a printer in Colorado Springs, a 30-player long list and a 31-player long list have already been emailed out, the floor about to belong to a different group of athletes wearing stars and stripes on their chest. I've spent enough Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays this spring on the courts where most of those names live during their domestic seasons that this week feels less like a transition and more like a reset. The work doesn't stop. The setting just changes. The opponents start saying things to each other that nobody in the Comerica Center crowd or the Houston gym has ever heard before. That's what the past seven days have been. Two roster sheets. A drawer full of MLV postseason hardware. A LOVB league office making the kind of phone calls that get the rest of the volleyball world to refresh its tabs. And a beach tournament in Huntington Beach that put a familiar pair back on top.
Somewhere in a gym right now, a twelve-year-old girl is watching professional volleyball on her phone between club practice sets. She has no idea that the league she is watching almost didn't exist. That it failed, actually. Over and over again, for fifty years. The story of women's professional volleyball in America is not a straight line from obscurity to a $325 million industry. It is a story of people who believed the market was ready, bet everything on it, and lost. Five times. Then, somehow, on the sixth try, the world caught up. I want to tell that story. All of it. Because the current moment in professional volleyball only makes sense when you know what came before.
Someone is already telling your story. I see it happen every single day. The only question is whether you are the one telling it. Every athlete has a narrative forming around them in real time, in the minds of coaches, scouts, fans, sponsors, and classmates. That narrative is built from everything they can see. The highlights. The interviews. The social media feed. The way you carry yourself when the game is on the line and when it is not. If you are not shaping that story intentionally, someone else is shaping it for you. Usually from incomplete information. Almost always in ways you would not choose.
Every photographer has a shot list. The smart ones know when to put it down. There is a category of image you can plan for. The team entrance. The pregame handshake. The trophy presentation. These are predictable, repeatable, and easy to set up. They document. They confirm that something happened. And they are almost never the ones that make anyone stop.
The fifth set was eight to five when I felt the camera get heavier. That happens. You shoot a thousand frames a night, your hands learn the rhythm, your shoulder finds the angle. But there is a specific moment in a five-set final, somewhere on the back half of the deciding set, when your body realizes the work is almost over and the result is going to matter for a long time. The Comerica Center was on its feet. The black-and-yellow side was louder than the building's own seating chart said it should be. On the floor in front of me, Sofia Maldonado Diaz of the Dallas Pulse loaded her left shoulder for a swing I had watched her make a hundred times that week. A third champion in three seasons of this league was about to be decided. And the expansion team in its first season was one set away from doing something no expansion team had ever done before. Going in, the Indy Ignite semifinal was supposed to be a victory lap. They came in 23-5. They had the regular-season title. Their head coach, Lauren Bertolacci, had just been named the 2026 MLV Coach of the Year. Their setter, Mia Tuaniga, was league MVP. Four Indy players were on the All-MLV First Team. Anybody filling out a bracket on Tuesday night was filling it out in pen. The Omaha Supernovas had other ideas.
Something is happening in Houston that most people outside the volleyball world have not noticed yet. This city is quietly becoming one of the most important volleyball markets in the country. Start with the professional level. LOVB Houston features Jordan Thompson, the league's 2025 Opposite Hitter of the Year and a two-time Olympic medalist. Justine Wong-Orantes, the Team USA libero, also calls this roster home. These are not fringe professionals hoping for a shot. These are among the best volleyball players on the planet, competing in a Houston arena on a regular schedule. Drive a few hours west on I-10 and you reach LOVB Austin, the defending league champions, led by Madisen Skinner, who grew up in Katy and won multiple NCAA titles at the University of Texas before going pro. Head north to Dallas and there is the Dallas Pulse, an MLV franchise that selected Mimi Colyer with the number one overall pick in the 2026 draft.
Every athlete pursuing NIL deals needs a portfolio. Most do not know what that actually means. I talk to athletes and families about this all the time, and the misconception is almost universal. An NIL portfolio is not your highlight tape. It is not your stats page or your recruiting profile. It is the curated collection of visual content that shows a brand exactly what a partnership with you looks like, before they ever commit to one. Think of it as a pitch deck. Brands evaluating NIL opportunities are making a business decision. They want to see the investment before they make it. A strong portfolio gives them that picture clearly and confidently.
Texas had the championship in their hand. Saturday afternoon in Gulf Shores, with the wind doing something a little strange off the water and the crowd packed three-deep along the ropes, the Longhorns walked the No. 3 Bruins to the cliff and gave them a push. Match point. Then another. Then another. Seven times the Texas pair on the deciding court served for the title match. Seven times something kept the ball alive on UCLA's side. Anybody who has spent enough time on the sand knows what that moment feels like. The serve is in the toss, the wind is in your favor, the bench is already half-standing. And then it isn't over. And then it isn't over again. By the fifth save you can see it in the body language. Texas didn't lose that match in the seventh save. They lost it somewhere around the third. That is how the 2026 NCAA beach volleyball championship got its title-match pairing, and it's where the week gets its title.
The gym gets loud before the match ever starts. Not the crowd. The shoes. Dozens of pairs squeaking and sliding on hardwood during warm-ups, and the rhythm of it is so specific to volleyball that you could close your eyes and know exactly which sport you walked into. I have shot professional volleyball at the highest levels in this country. I have been on the floor at NCAA Division I matches. I have had a credential around my neck at USAV Junior Nationals, surrounded by thousands of young athletes who trained their entire lives for the tournament happening in front of them. The photos capture peaks. The kill that wins the set. The celebration that follows. The block that changes momentum. Those moments are real and they matter. But they are a fraction of what actually happens in that space.
Most programs think about photography as a cost. The ones winning off the field think about it as an investment. The difference in how you frame it changes what you are willing to spend — and what you actually get back. Here is what professional sports content actually returns to a team or organization that uses it well.
There is a specific kind of third set you only get at double elimination events, and it does not happen on Friday. It happens on Saturday afternoon, after you have already lost once, when the Texas weather has turned on you and the sand is colder and wetter than it was at eight in the morning and the math of the bracket has stopped being theoretical. I watched one of those third sets in Austin this past weekend. The Junk twins, Addi and Avery, were in a grinder against Maya Gessner and Kate Reilly on Court 5. They had already split the first two. The third set went their way, fifteen to seven, and it was the third time they had gone the distance that weekend. They are eighteen years old. They live in Redondo Beach. And in August they are getting on a plane to Tallahassee, together.
The Women's World Championship final between Italy and Turkey drew nearly four million viewers on Italian television this year. That is a 33% audience share in one of Europe's most competitive broadcast markets. In that same country, volleyball claimed the top three positions in sports broadcasting for the month of August, ahead of basketball, athletics, and motorsports. That is not a niche sport. That is a global force. And Italy is only one piece of the picture.
A media day is not a photo session. It is a brand moment. The difference matters because what you walk away with depends entirely on how you walk in. Most teams show up, go through the motions, collect a few images, and wonder why none of it ever looks the way they imagined. The shoot that actually delivers is built before anyone steps in front of a camera.
There is a moment in a long match, usually somewhere in the fourth set, when you can tell who a team actually is. Not who they want to be. Not who they were in January. Who they are right now, in this building, with the season on the line. Body language tells you first. Then the serve receive. Then whether or not the setter is calm. I've covered enough volleyball to know what a team looks like when it decides it's done. You can see it before the scoreboard catches up. Saturday night, LOVB Austin didn't look like a team that was done. They came into Game 2 of the championship series trailing one match to zero, LOVB Salt Lake having won Game 1 in five dramatic sets two nights earlier. The pressure was entirely on Austin. Win and force a golden set. Lose and hand Salt Lake their first title. That is the kind of pressure that reveals who a team actually is. Austin's answer was definitive.
Club volleyball season is a machine. Tournaments stacked on top of each other, travel weekends that blur together, and a constant push to develop athletes who can compete at the next level. Directors pour everything into coaching, facilities, and competition schedules. Almost none of them are investing in how their athletes look when coaches are watching from a distance. I do not mean game film. Every serious club records matches. I mean the visual content that shapes perception before a college coach ever opens a recruiting profile. The headshots. The action photography. The branded content that tells a coach this athlete and this program take their presentation as seriously as their performance.
Championships are won in a season. Legacies are built over years. Most high school programs celebrate the first and rarely invest in the second. They post the trophy photo, run the banquet, retire a jersey now and then — and then the cycle resets and last year's story quietly disappears. The programs with real brand equity do something different. They treat every season as a chapter in a longer story. The wins matter, but so does the culture. The athletes graduate, but the identity of the program carries forward.
There is a difference between regular season volleyball and playoff volleyball. I have seen it from the sideline enough times to know. The air changes. The timeouts get louder. Every rally carries weight that it did not carry two weeks ago. That is what happened in Louisville on Friday night when the LOVB playoffs opened at Freedom Hall. In one match, Houston fell behind two sets to one against Salt Lake and looked like the top seed heading for an early exit. Then the fifth set happened. 15-7. Not a contest. A declaration. In the other match, Austin swept Atlanta in three sets with the kind of composure that championship teams carry into the postseason. Two matches. Two very different stories. And a week across professional volleyball that reminded everyone what the stakes look like when they are real.
I was standing courtside at a LOVB Houston match earlier this season when something struck me. The arena was loud. The production was polished. The athletes on the floor were Olympians. And somewhere in another city, another group of Olympians was playing the same sport under a completely different league banner. Professional volleyball in the United States is no longer a dream. It is a reality. Two realities, actually. Major League Volleyball and League One Volleyball have each raised over $100 million in funding. Both feature world-class athletes. Both are broadcasting nationally. And both are growing fast. MLV fields eight franchises across markets like Dallas, Omaha, and Atlanta, with 50 matches airing on CBS Sports and Fox this season alone. LOVB operates six teams, including two right here in Texas, and its games on ESPN are drawing viewership 11% higher than regular-season NCAA volleyball.
The scoreboard does not close the deal. The content does. That might be the most important thing a high-performing athlete can understand about the NIL landscape right now. Brands are not just evaluating your athletic record when they decide whether to partner with you. They are evaluating your image, your audience, your consistency, and the quality of the content attached to your name. I have seen it play out over and over. A five-star recruit with no social presence and a phone full of blurry post-game selfies is a harder pitch to a sponsor than a three-star athlete with a polished personal brand, a growing audience, and professional photos that make every brand placement look credible.
I was standing behind the baseline in Cedar Park on Thursday night when Logan Eggleston ripped the kill that sealed the second set 29-27. The crowd at the H-E-B Center was already standing. They had been for a while. It was Fan Appreciation Night at LOVB Austin, but the energy in that building had nothing to do with giveaways or promotions. It was desperation. The good kind. Austin needed that match. Salt Lake needed it just as badly. And across professional volleyball right now, with regular seasons winding down in both leagues, that combination is producing some of the best volleyball I have watched all year. This was the week the margins disappeared. In LOVB, a four-time Olympic medalist reminded first-place Houston that the regular season title is not a formality. In MLV, the back half of the standings got a jolt from a franchise record-breaker in Columbus and an eight-match winning streak that refuses to end in Dallas. Nobody blinked. Nobody backed down. And the playoff picture in both leagues is still being written.
Coaches are not just watching film anymore. Before a call gets made, before a visit gets scheduled, before a scholarship conversation ever starts — there is a very good chance someone on that staff has already looked your athlete up online. What they find matters.
Atlanta was hitting .448 in the second set. The gym was leaning their way. Two sets up with a crowd behind them, everything pointed toward a third straight LOVB victory. And then Nebraska decided they were not done. What followed on Wednesday night in Atlanta was one of those sequences that reminds you why this sport never lets you leave early. Nebraska clawed back one set. Then another. Then closed it out 15-10 in the fifth to complete a reverse sweep that nobody in that building saw coming. It was the kind of match that changes a team's identity. And it was not the only time this week that someone tore up the script.
Nobody remembers the score the way they remember the feeling. You can recite the final scoreline of a dozen big games from the last five years. But what actually stays with you? The image of a player on their knees at midfield. The sideline moment between a coach and a senior playing their last game. The point guard holding the net on a ladder, eyes closed, head back, like they are trying to memorize what this feels like. Those images do not just document a win. They make you feel it.
NIL did not create the opportunity. It just made it official. Athletes have always had the ability to build something around their name and identity. The rule change just gave them permission to monetize it. And that changed the math in a way most high school athletes have not fully processed yet. Here is what the smart ones have figured out: the athletes who benefit most from NIL are not the ones who scramble to build a brand when an opportunity shows up. They are the ones who built the brand before anyone asked.
Every sporting event gets photographed. Fewer stories get told. There is a real difference between capturing a game and creating content that builds something. Both require a camera. Only one requires a strategy. A sports photographer delivers images. Sharp, well-lit, technically sound images. That matters. It is table stakes. But a technically correct photo of a winning moment is still just a photo if it sits in a folder or gets posted without context, without narrative, without intention.
College recruiters have seen thousands of highlight reels. Most look exactly the same. Same angles. Same music. Same slow-motion touchdowns. The reel says "I can play." That part is assumed. Every recruit can play.
If you love high school volleyball,Volleypaloozais one of the biggest showcases of talent you’ll find all season. Held just north of Austin, this annual tournament brings together powerhouse programs from across the state, with a handful from outside of Texas, to compete at a high level of play before all eyes become focused on district play.
There’s nothing quite like the buzz of a new season — the mix of adrenaline, pride, and possibility that fills the room as high school athletes gear up for what’s next. On July 24, I had the opportunity to photograph a Media Day forLamar Consolidated ISD, an event powered by the incredible team atVYPE Media. As a photographer, I thrive on moments like these — where athletes bring their full energy and personality to the set. We covered nearly every fall sports team across their seven high school campus — football, volleyball, cross country, cheer, tennis, water polo, and more. Several athletes had just come off state championship seasons, and you could feel that championship DNA in every pose and interaction. Randall High School had the rings and trophy to show for their2024 5A DII State Championshiptitle, and Fulshear Volleyball continues on the adrenaline of their run to the 2024 6A State Final, where they fell short to Grand Oaks in four. It did not stop there. There were track athletes with more bling than Rick Ross and Drake combined. Each shot was a chance to spotlight the hard work behind the wins and the anticipation of what’s to come. Whether it was a group shot or an individual hype shot, every click of the shutter captured something real.
Heading to Dallas for the USAV Nationals from June 30 to July 3? So am I—and I’m bringing my camera! As a professionalsports and actionphotographer, I’ll be capturing the energy, emotion, and unforgettable moments of the tournament. Whether you’re looking for team coverage or individual highlights, I’ve got you covered with flexible options designed to fit every need and budget. I’m offering three distinct ways to lock in action photography coverage at the2025 USAV Nationals: Option One: Team Match Reservation ($275 per Match/2-3 sets) Best for : Teams that want to share the cost and spread the photography coverage. Breakdown : The reservation cost can be shared between some or all teammates. For example, a team of 10 athletes contributes $27.50 per athlete to a team mom who makes the reservation. Includes : High-resolution, professionally edited action shots, of as many players as possible, delivered via private digital gallery. Perfect for parents or coaches organizing group coverage—split the cost, share the memories.
Whether you are a high school athlete aiming for the next level, a proud parent trying to support the journey, or a coach building a brand that a community can support,sports photographyplays a powerful role in telling your story. But not all sports photography is the same. There are two distinct styles—Action Sports Photography vs. Media Day, or sometimes called Hype Sports Photography— and each serve very different purposes. As aSports & Action Photographer, I love both and believe that leveraging the value of both will help you with the goals you are working so hard to accomplish. Action Sports Photography captures live game moments—split-second plays, explosive motion, and raw emotion. This is the ball touching the hand of the libero as her pancake save keeps a rally alive. It is the keeper in mid-air making a save while surrounded by the opposing team after a corner set piece. It is also the perfect tag at home plate by a catcher who is receiving the full force of a runner’s momentum and determination from third base. Just as important, action photography is also about capturing the moment raw emotion erupts in jubilation, depicting the passion and leadership of an athlete. Recruiting profiles and highlight reels
As a photographer in Katy, TX who specializes inSports & Action Photography,I’ve seen firsthand the power of a well-captured image. In today’s competitive athletic landscape, standing out to college recruiters takes more than just talent — it requires a professional presentation along with relational networking skills, all of which position the student athlete as a desirable asset for a college program. Professional photography is a tool that helps elevate the presentation and professionalism of an athlete. College recruiters are flooded with highlight reels and stat sheets. What is it that might capture their attention long enough for a deeper or second look? A jaw-dropping photo that freezes a split-second of brilliance — a diving catch, a hitter coiled high above the net, a three-point shot released over the outstretched arms of a defender, a patient pass over the rushing defense. ProfessionalSports Photographycaptures not only the action but the intensity, focus, and drive that define an athlete’s character. With college scouting becoming more digital than ever, especially post-pandemic, athletes and families are investing in curated visual content that elevates their online presence. A high-impact image can become the cover of a recruitment profile, social media banner, or even the first impression in an email to a coach.
At the moment, graduation ceremonies in our Katy, TX school district are coming to a close. Those who were juniors are now our new seniors! These amazing incoming seniors find themselves neatly nestled in the calm before storm. The ideal time to get your professional senior portraits on the calendar is now. Before the school year kicks off with sports, homework, and college prep, there’s one important opportunity you don’t want to miss: your senior portrait photo session. As a professionalphotographerwho specializes in seniorportrait photography, I recommend getting your photographer booked before the end of the summer. Ideally, I recommend scheduling your senior portrait session during the summer before senior year starts—and here’s why:
Preparing for your senior portrait session involves more than just picking a date and time. It requires careful planning and consideration, from selecting an ideal location around Katy that reflects your personal style to choosing outfits that highlight your individuality. Whether you're aiming for classic elegance, editorial edge, or modern flair, these preparatory steps will ensure your senior portraits are a true reflection of who you are at this moment in your life. Let's delve into how I,Matt Powell, would love to help you make your senior portrait experience in Katy, TX, a memorable one.
Intensity is simply defined as the level of effort exerted. Taking sports and action photos can often capture facial expressions that are quite different from those seen in portraits. And, I know that athletes sometimes find these expressions less desirable. Perhaps we should view this differently. I love capturing portraits and strive to capture the most flattering and personality-highlighting expressions. However, in sports and action photography, I aim to capture INTENSITY. I believe that capturing intensity represents the level of effort exerted by the athlete... which I also refer to as "heart."
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