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I think if you are "telling the story", there is a need for a variety of cropping options.
Sometimes a wide crop tells the story of context. eg one competitor way out in front. One competitor in the loneliness of their environment (cross country runner showing how far they have come, how much to go)
Then there are crops that focus in on the peak action - catching that moment of time when something terrific/spectacular happened. These would be much tighter. Second baseman jumping as running slides in. Here the focus is on the inter action between these two players - other elements are not required and in fact may be a source of distraction.
Then there are crops that focus in on the emotion of sports - sometimes this is a really tight crop on a competitor's face in anguish/pain/determination etc. Sometimes it's a wider crop that focuses on the competition between two. eg sprinters lunging for the finish line.
The "always" tight crop is really relevant to newspaper publishing. They don't want wasted space in an image that doesn't contribute to the story. They are looking for high impact, catch your attention images. You won't find many loose cropped sports images here. I generally submit tight but NOT real tight images to newspapers. I leave a bit of "wiggle" room for the editor to best fit the image on the page (sometimes they completely "butcher" an image but that is their prerogative.
For your general sports photography though, I like a variety of crop approaches. Some for context, some for emotion, some for action. I'm sure parent would like to see a variety rather than "crop tight" for every image.
I agree with the idea of leaving slightly more room for the player to move into, the ball to fly into etc.
When cropping people the usual advice is to not crop at joints (ankles, knees, elbows wrists etc). It is usually better to crop between joints (thighs, shins, fore-arm, upper-arm)
Factors that might influence your crops ... there is an acronym covering four aspects of sports photography ... F.A.C.T
Face: include the player(s) face(s) in the shot (that doesn't mean that non-face shots can not be compelling)
Action: captured or blurred to show movement or implied movement (eg player off the ground, ball hitting bat)
Contact: with another player, bat hitting ball, pole bending
Toy: ball, bat, hockey stick, football etc
The usual advice is: get all four components in a single image usually makes for a great sports photo. Get three or two is more common. If you have one or none, it probably won't make a compelling image.
So cropping - depends on the final use. Variety of crop options usually good for overall story.
Should you crop to a specific ratio to match print sizes? Depends on what your end-game is. For me, I don't ... I crop for the action regardless of the ratio (turns out I usually have a third of them are portrait orientation, a third are landscape orientation and a third are square!! Also most of mine only ever end up on the web. If people want the digital file, they get my random crop ratio. If I have to print to a specific ratio for a print, I will go back to the original and reprocess as needed. If I am producing a multi-photo collage then my random crop ratio is what I use.
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