High School says it all! They don't have the same sort of lights they use for the televised games in the big smoke! The lights will give you some background light but if you want to capture good looking action you will want to use rear curtain flash sync so the action doesn't lead the play. You have to work with the amount of light available, but you can add a bit in a number of cases. There are some events they don't like flash cameras being used, such as showjumping at night and what I have used is an old Rollie 120 TLR camera with 1/30 and wide open at f 3.5 and crop the image to suit. The larger format worked quite well for the horses approaching the high point in the jump and made a much better grain with the Konica 3200 film I used, but I have heard this has been discontinued. Plan our shots before the subject arrives at the point the shot will be taken and have all your focus and exposure set manual or preset with lock button held in. Some action is in better angles for slower exposure and experience can help a little but often it's more to do with luck. Use the movement in the shots as a part of the action the game expresses and blow up a few of the movement blurred ones to poster size and have a second look at how much the movement blur enhances the athletic side of the sport! Use it as your friend! To capture outdoor action where the light bleeds away to the sky instead of reflected by white walls and short distances you need to have either time or a big flash. I have hooked up four (yes, 4!) Nikon SB24's to the one F801s all handheld for outdoor rodeo shots. It's easy to do and they can all mount onto a collection of flash brackets that most old photographers gather over a lifetime. The only difficult bit is to pay for all the (propriety Nikon) cables to join them up! You can use normal PC cables to keep the cost down but loose the autoexposure. To gain extra light from using multiple flash units, remember it's an inverse square law that gives you each extra stop so to get twice the light at the subject you need four flash units and to get three times the light you need nine flash units so it depends on how big your budget is. Just in case you have a couple of buckets of money under the stairs, and have a few years of weight training behind you, you could get five times the light with 25 flash units! Or you could use half a pound of good old magnesium flash powder and a match to light up the whole ground for three frames on your motor drive! Years ago, I had a beginner 35mm camera with fixed 45 mm lens (from Montgomery Wards) and with shutter speed from 1/125 to 1/8 + B, or something like that. It had only X synchronization, so that I had to shoot at 1/30 second with the regular flash bulbs (before inexpensive strobes). Somewhere I found some special magnesium flash bulbs (either M2 or #5 size, forgot which), that had a flash duration of about 1/250 second, as opposed to about 1/40 second duration for the normal aluminum variety. Wow! I got some and got some nice (for that camera, anyway) action shots from the highschool basketball game.