I've been assigned to buy a camera for my local youth football organization to film their games for the coaches to view and for the end of the year video highlights,

I would love to hear some advice on which camera would be good for sporting events, they are willing to spend around $2000 to $2500 for a camera ( flashcards only...No tapes).

I have been reading about the Canon XA10 and HF G10 and they sound very good and also can shoot at 60fps which will be used for slow motion.

I did some filming for their Super Bowl games this year with my Canon A1 and H1 and they were just blown away by it and want to purchase a camera that is close to the A1 that can shoot in HD.
Here's a link to the Super Bowl highlight 2010 Raynham Giants Superbowl Highlights (http://www.dragonflyproduction.net/giants/)

any advice would be appreciated !!!!!!

I shot high school soccer games for two years using an XHA1,
One day I had some technical problems with that cam so I grabbed my HV-20.
When I went back and reviewed the tape as I was editing it, I was impressed by the video quality.
For what I was using the cam for (game reviews), the HV-20 was sufficient.

Today's single chip small handy cams with card storage are the way to go.
The difficult part of shooting a game is having a good viewfinder/display screen so you can see the action and a basic pan head and tripod so you can track and pan smoothly.

Take a laptop with you and you can download from the card and review the game on the bus ride home.

For the price, the Canon XA10 and G10 do seem like a good deal. Keep in mind they won't have the zoom range of the A1 and H1 cameras. The XA10 and G10 have a 10X zoom, whereas the A1 has a 20X zoom.

The zoom range is a problem, but what other options do I have ?

What about canon xh-a1 used , You can buy them for about $1800.00
and the dn-60 Datavideo DN-60 Digital CF Card Recorder DN-60 B&H Photo Video


You get a lot more camera then the XA10 for almost the same price and still not using tapes.

A company I sometimes shoot sports for now uses hard disc based camcorders. The reason is that you can record several uninterrupted hours of highest quality video. Previously, we had used tape based camcorders, changing the tape at halftime. There were a few times when a one-hour tape wasn't quite enough to get the entire half. Also, you can upload the game to a computer much faster with a hard disc than with tape. A memory card based camcorder might work as well, if the card has enough capacity to record an entire game at high quality.

Ken