Personally, I’ve found a couple tricks that I try to use when capturing action sports. Fast and slow shutter speeds are the biggest variant and hard enough to learn especially when beginning with fast moving sports. I would suggest starting in Shutter Priority mode until you get comfortable with it — then comes the fun of learning how to vary aperture to blur the background.

With respect to shutter speed, the tricks I’ve found are:
1. Fast shutter speed can make for intense, action stopping shots. But you have to focus close in on the person and get a good facial expression or an interesting pose. For example, in your second shot above, if you were able to get a frontal view of the woman spiking the ball and zoom in so she filled most of the frame, you’d have a winner. Zooming in means that you’d have to capture the ball about a foot from her hand — another hard task. This technique would have also worked for the shot entitled “Great Defense”.

2. Slow shutter speeds are great for action as you captured in a few of the shots. Again though, if the face is out of focus, you loose the personal touch of the shot that will draw in viewers. In volleyball, you could try to capture someone at the peak of a jump to spike the ball — an almost unnoticeable pause where the person seems to hover. Setting the shutter speed correctly will give great arm movement and ball movement while still retaining a mostly focused body. Again, zooming in can make these shots even more amazing.

In general, the best way to shoot sports is to practice a little and figure out what shutter speed is necessary to give the desired amount of motion. Looking at your shots above, it looks like one step faster than 1/40 sec would be about right — ball motion, arm motion but limited body motion.

All in all, these are some great shots of some quite talented players! I’m with you — I’d watch the ball go by with a camera in my hand…