Photographing the UTRGV Driscoll Tailgate & 2026 Home Opener

Yesterday I got to spend part of the afternoon and evening photographing the Driscoll Children’s Hospital area at the UTRGV tailgate before the Vaqueros kicked off their 2026 football season.

NOW that was a fun assignment!

I was out there for a few hours photographing people coming through the Driscoll tailgate area, families stopping by and just trying to capture what was going on around the tailgate.

There were Vaquero colors everywhere and you could tell people were ready for football to be back. I also got to catch up with some of the other groups that were out there, including Rio Bank and one of the local radio stations. One of the nice things about doing this for as long as I have is running into people I’ve worked around over the years.

One of my favorite things to photograph was actually pretty simple.  Driscoll was giving out these huge foam fingers and the kids loved them.  Their reactions were great. Those are usually the pictures I like anyway. Not necessarily the big posed moment, but the little things happening around it. A kid getting excited, somebody laughing or people just enjoying themselves.

Eventually it was game time and everybody started making their way inside.

By then my assignment was getting pretty easy. I photographed some of the Driscoll signage around the stadium and stayed for a little while after kickoff.

I even got to shoot some football.

I haven’t photographed sports in a few years, so I was curious to see if I was rusty.

Thankfully, I wasn’t too bad.

Sports photography actually goes way back for me. I started shooting sports in high school, and later I got the chance to help out with our local CHL hockey team. That was really when I started falling in love with photography.  So being back on the field with a camera was a lot of fun and kind of felt like I never left.

UTRGV ended up beating UT Permian Basin 44-0, and apparently the crowd really was as big as it felt. They had 13,698 people there, a new program record.  (Not a bad way to start the season).

But probably my favorite part of the night happened after I was pretty much finished.  I took a minute and sat down on the edge of the field.  The teams and the other photographers were way down at the other end, so for a few minutes I basically had the whole end zone to myself.  I just sat there and looked around.  And it hit me.  I graduated from UTPA in 1999, long before it became UTRGV, and there is no way I would have imagined back then that one day our university would have a football team.  I always thought that if somebody ever figured out how to make college football happen down here, it would be huge. The 956 is football country.  (Then again, I guess all of Texas is football country).

But sitting there looking at the stadium, the field, the lights and all those people, I couldn’t help wondering how different some of my weekends in college would have been if we’d had something like this to look forward to.  This is only UTRGV football’s second season and the excitement doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. If anything, it feels bigger.

I hope that never dies.

Maybe one of these days I’ll get to come back without cameras hanging off of me, buy a ticket, sit in the stands and just enjoy a game.

Yesterday wasn’t that day.

But I did get to sit in the end zone by myself for a couple of minutes and take it all in.

The best seat in the house.