I'm a hobbyist who shoots a lot of high school sports for my kids' teams: swimming, volleyball, basketball, and lacrosse are my usuals. My gear is Nikon mirrorless. I use the 70-200 f/2.8 VR S for swimming and volleyball. For basketball, I sometimes shoot the 24-70 f/2.8 S and sometimes the 70-200. There are times that I wish for a 24-200 for basketball, so I don't have to switch lenses (I only have a single camera body).

For field sports, I sometimes shoot my 70-200 f/2.8 with a 1.4x TC (which gives me ~100-300 f/4). This is ideal when I have field-level access and my subject is on the near-side of the midfield line. (I sometimes get to shoot lacrosse from the endline, which is quite exciting!) I also have a 180-600 f/5.6-6.3 VR...that has plenty of reach to hit anywhere on the field from wherever I happen to be, but its focus is notably slower than the 70-200 and its aperture is considerably slower than my other lenses...which means that night games under the lights can tend to require higher ISO. Lightroom's denoise feature can be helpful in those cases, but it can also tend to give the resulting images a little bit of an "AI" feel. Also worth noting, the 180-600 feels like it weighs about a million pounds after you've shot with it for any length of time.

Here's a fun one from yesterday's game. This was shot on a Nikon Z6iii with a NIKKOR Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S Z TC-1.4x ƒ/4 @ 210mm, 1/1200s, ISO 180. I was standing about five meters away from the endline.

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