Take a look at this image from soccer

Had a chance to try out a Nikon 70-200mm 2.8 VR this weekend. Shot my son's soccer game.

This image is only imported to LR 5.6, Lens Correction, Auto WB, rotated to be level and exported to JPEG.

Indoor arena (obviously). Looks like I missed focus as well?

D7100
200mm
1/125
f2.8
ISO 1250
RAW

Image is pretty grainy. ISO too high? I'd think 1250 is nothing on this camera.

Thanks.

Uh, It took me ages to get that photo loaded.

It is not that sharp and clear. Where did you focus at?

125th is slow for 200mm, was VR on? Even with it on, any subject movement at 200mm is going to be a problem. Technically, I think 1200 is about the upper limit without noise.

Not sure where the focus hit on this one, maybe the net?

I didn't think about focal length & speed... should have been at least 1/200th... I'm mainly concerned about the noise.

Low light and low shutter speed is going to produce the problem, especially with the D7100 pixel density so high, you really need fast shutter speeds. See this link From DXO and check out the definitions for ISO, will shed some "light" on the problem.

Tests and reviews for the camera Nikon D7100 - DxOMark

Thanks. Just what I need. .. more learnin'

From DXO,

"Sports & action photography: Low-Light ISO

Unlike the two previous scenarios in which light is either generous (studio) or stability is assured (landscape), photojournalists and action photographers often struggle with low available light and high motion. Achieving usable image quality is often difficult when pushing ISO.
When shooting a moving scene such as a sports event, action photographers’ primary objective is to freeze the motion, giving priority to short exposure time. To compensate for the lack of exposure, they have to increase the ISO setting, which means the SNR will decrease. How far can they go while keeping decent quality? Our low-light ISO metric will tell them.
The SNR indicates how much noise is present in an image compared to the actual information (signal). The higher the SNR value, the better the image looks, because details aren't drowned by noise. SNR strength is given in dB, which is a logarithmic scale: an increase of 6 dB corresponds to doubling the SNR, which equates to half the noise for the same signal.
An SNR value of 30dB means excellent image quality. Thus low-light ISO is the highest ISO setting for a camera that allows it to achieve an SNR of 30dB while keeping a good dynamic range of 9 EVs and a color depth of 18bits.
A difference in low-light ISO of 25% represents 1/3 EV and is only slightly noticeable.
As cameras improve, low-light ISO will continuously increase, making this scale open."

So even though it is rated at 1256, you still need ample light to get good results at 1250.

If you were in a bright setting, you wouldn't have had noise at 1250, but it is getting into a weaker zone.

Great info - thank you sir

When shooting sports keep your shutter above 500, preferred 800+.
Dont be afraid to shoot over 6000 iso. Just invest in a good noise image reducer. I use neat image and shoot 5000-10,000 iso all the time using a D7000.
I have good results. Here is a couple post showing high iso

http://nikonites.com/sports/20403-hs-basketball-10-000-iso-image-d7000.html

http://nikonites.com/d7000/8545-high-iso-sports.html#post84920

I look at sports the way I do birds in flight - I shoot in manual mode, setting Aperture and Shutter Speed, and use Auto ISO with my max ISO set appropriately to get proper exposure. If I get the "red flash" in the viewfinder letting me know it's too dark I will adjust one of those three. In general, I will always pick more noise as I'm still left with a photo I can use. A noiseless, blurry photo is going to get tossed 19 times out of 20, with the exception being the, "Damn, it's blurry - but that still looks interesting", variety. A noisy photo can be dealt with almost all the time - even at 6400 on my D7100.