Redwood has a strong tradition of sports photographers at events but sometimes it’s not the safest thing to do.
By: Anex Estrada
Last Friday, November 1st, marks the 2nd year anniversary of Journalism, Photography, and AP Literature teacher Mr. Nick Miller’s near-death experience at Cowhide 67. On the field, the Rangers won the game handily by a score of 28-0, but it wasn’t free from drama off the field.
Mr. Miller was down on the sidelines, clicking away on his camera. It was about the last ten seconds of the game, and Dallas Harris, ’24, intercepted the ball from Mt Whitney. Harris was running towards the endzone, and he was right on the sidelines.
During all of this, Mr. Miller was taking pictures, and he shoots with his right eye so he didn’t see from the corner of his eye that a player was coming straight for him.
“I just remember seeing click, click, click, click, and then boom, I woke up on the ground. Like it knocked me unconscious.”
Mr. Miller gets tacked by Harris and the camera hits his eye as he falls back and gets knocked unconscious. The impact of the hit caused the camera lens to break.
The editor-in-chief of the Gigantea at the time, Brianna Burr, ’24, yells at Mr. Miller’s daughter Gwyn Miller, ’25, “Miller down!” They then all ran over to him and picked him up off of the ground.
When Mr. Miller was asked, What hurt more? Getting knocked unconscious or having your camera broken, his response was, “Oh, breaking my camera. I can always get another head.”
A journalism mom set up a GoFundMe for Mr. Miller to get him the money for a new lens, since it cost $900 to get the lens repaired. Thanks to the mom who set up the GoFundMe, he got his lens repaired, which originally cost $2,500.
Ever since the Cowhide incident, Mr. Miller has been courageous enough to go down and still take pictures on the sidelines. However, he always gets little flashbacks if a player gets too close to him and the camera.
“At the Pinkout game, this boy was running up on the sidelines and I had a full-on flashback. I was like, ‘this is gonna happen again.’ I used to stay longer and take more pictures and now I jump out of the way.”
Mr. Miller still has some trauma from this, but he’s brave enough to go down and take amazing pictures of the football players on the track. He always remembers not to be too close to the players.
“It cut my head, like it was bad, [but we] went to In-N-Out afterwards with Gwyn, my daughter.”
Anexahi Estrada
Tags: Art & Entertaiment, cowhide, rangers, Redwood, redwood gigantea, redwood high school, redwood journalism, redwood rangers, rhs, visalia ca
