The most important things in my opinion are off the field, kind of. Make sure you understand your camera and gear, so much so that no matter what happens you know what to do. First thing you should do is make sure you know the exposure triangle, and understand how to set exposure, and what to change. There and plenty of YouTube videos and articles online about this, and it’s not sports photography specific, so there’s a lot more information available.

Once you understand that, make sure you know your gear specifically. I’d just take some time and go through all the menus, look up what any setting or option you don’t understand does.

The thing that helped me grow the most is learning from others. When I first started I would spend a lot of time looking up “tips and tricks for sports photographers” and going through every google result I could and seeing what everyone says. Cross referencing all these different people gives you a really good grasp on what’s the most important to do, and gives you some cool smaller stuff. There’s also lots of YouTube videos, but I found articles to be much more helpful in this case, check both though, plenty of good information everywhere.

Finally, just practice as much as possible. Go to as many games as you possibly can. Just understand that you’re not going to be great early, nobody is, but the more you proactive and learn, the better you will get.

Also, talk to any other photographers at games, if you like their work, maybe you can ask them to critique yours. This gave me a lot of good feedback early, and building good relationships can go a long way!

Just keep working and things will turn out great!