Tom Reel of San Antonio Express-News won first place in the Associated Press Sports Editors 2018 contest in Action Photo for the B Division.
Reel will be presented a first-place plaque at the 2019 APSE Summer Conference Banquet at the Omni CNN Center in Atlanta on June 19.
Reel edged runner-up Stuart Cahill of the Boston Herald. Michael Clevenger and Kelly Estep of the Courier Journal (Louisville, Ky.) placed third.
Sports editors in the B Division submitted 52 action photo entries. The contest is open to APSE members. Click here to join.
Contest chair Todd M. Adams and fellow APSE officers John Bednarowski, Lisa Wilson and Dan Spears prepared entries. In February, preliminary judges at the APSE Winter Conference in Orlando, Fla., and off-site around the country, selected a top 10, with each judge ranking the entries in order from 1 to 10 separately on a secret ballot. Entries were given 10 points for a first-place vote, nine points for second and so on down to one point for a 10th-place vote. The final 10 were given to a second judging group, which ranked the entries 1-10 in the same fashion.
The winner and final rankings are determined by tallying the ballots.
The winner in each category will receive a plaque at the summer conference. The second- through 10th-place writers will receive frameable certificates.
Action photo entries were the best single action photo from a sporting event by the photographer, with judging based on the quality of the photo.
The top 10 is listed below with links to the winning entries.
- Tom Reel, San Antonio Express-News, 35 points
- Stuart Cahill, Boston Herald, 32 points, two first-place votes
- Michael Clevenger, Kelly Estep, Courier Journal (Louisville, Ky.), 29 points, two first-place votes
- Matt Kryger, IndyStar (Indianapolis, Ind.), 28 points
- Shelby Lum, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 27 points
- Sam Upshaw Jr., Courier Journal (Louisville, Ky.), 20 points
- Bill Mitchell, The Villages Daily Sun, 17 points
- Ricardo Brazziell, Austin American-Statesman, 13 points
- Christopher Evans, Boston Herald, 10 points
- Andrew Dye, Winston-Salem Journal, 9 points
