Sports photography has the ability to capture that split second in time when a baseball collides with the swing of a bat, or a basketball going through a net as a player slams a dunk.
These types of unguarded, action packed photographs have been taken by Will DeVan, a man who 15 years ago was flattened on the sidelines by Michael Westbrook, receiver for the Washington Redskins at the time while trying to get a “money shot” for the paper.
“There’s something about (photography) that appeals to me so much,” DeVan said. “When I saw something that was absolutely beautiful, I wanted to be able to share it and I just didn’t have the words to tell it or the talent to paint it, but I could do it in photography.”
Making it a career
In 1992 DeVan studied photography at Setan Hill College in Greensburg, Penn., after realizing graphic design was not for him. DeVan said while he was attending Setan Hill he was offered jobs because his photography was doing well. That’s when he decided to leave college and go to Washington D.C. to work, where he ended up photographing NFL, WNBA and NBA games.
“School kind of fell to the wayside when I learned I could make a paycheck, so I left and moved back to the D.C. area where I started working at a camera store called Penn Camera,” he said. “My manager’s dad was the official photographer of the Redskins and when he needed an assistant, I was more than happy to volunteer.”
“Then people started saying, ‘We need some photos at the Caps center (known as Verizon Center), where the Mystics (Washington D.C. WNBA team) were playing,” DeVan added. “And my career just took off from there.”
But after seeing 9/11 and dealing with the D.C. sniper, DeVan said the city and the not-so-glamorous job had taken its toll on him.
“In my lifetime I got to do more in photography than most people ever get to do in their whole life. It was cool, but it was also a very dirty job. Very brutal,” he said. “People are elbowing you and smacking you around with a 30 pound lens because they think you are going to get the shot that every paper in the world is going to want to print. When I decided to quit it had run its course on me mentally.”
Finding Sinclair
After deciding that he accomplished everything he wanted to in photography and needing to find a nice place to raise his daughter, Molly, and his wife, Ruth, moved to Dayton with DeVan.
“When my wife and I moved up here from (Washington) D.C, we decided I would quit photography and become a stay at home dad,” he said. “I was so burned out with it. I started my career at 20 (years old) and when I quit I was 34. That’s a career for most people and I thought it was time to move on.”
When Molly hit school age DeVan decided it was time to go back to school and find something else to do with his life. That is when he enrolled at Sinclair and started studying Sports Management.
DeVan, who teaches fencing at Sinclair, said two quarters ago he was doing an internship with men’s basketball coach Jeff Price when he saw the pictures Sinclair was using for the newspaper and asked Price if he could volunteer his talents.
“I saw the photos we were using and I was concerned about it, so I said to him, why not let me do something productive. I have this talent. Let me use it,” he said.
DeVan is now the photographer for Sinclair’s baseball and basketball games and said that although he won’t ever make a career out of photography, he enjoys taking them for the school.
“Oddly enough despite my burnout with photography this really jazzed me up a little bit,” he said. “I still don’t want to do it in the sense that I did before, but I just love doing it. I am the only guy out there. I can go wherever I want, I get the shots I want and, well, the pictures speak for themselves. I am proud of them.”