Nikon D5000 w/ 55-200 lens?

I have been taking photos at my sons Football games, after half time the pics are super blurry. I have a Nikon D5000 w/ 55-200 lens. My question is: Is there a certain setting I could use so the pics will not be blurs running by? I use the auto setting mostly but have also tried the sport setting.

I'm afraid you may actually have to learn something about photography to solve this.

Are you shooting at night? If so, set your ISO at 3200 or 6400 and fix the noise in post.

Do you have your white balance set to incandescent or a specific Kelvin temperature to match the lighting on the field?

I shoot all my sports in RAW. The resulting RAW images processed and saved as a high resolution JPEG are much better than a standard, Large, Fine JPEG generated by your camera.

Are you shooting with the lens wide open and at a shutter speed of at least 1/500th second (1/640th or 1/800th would be better)?

Here is a recent shot taken with an old Nikon D300 @ 3200 ISO in RAW. Noise reduction was done using Lightroom 3 tools. All 300 images were corrected at once

Without seeing the pictures it is difficult to say what combination of issues you have.

Basically you need to have a faster enough shutter speed to be able to stop the movement, plus the focus needs to be accurate. (Some blur can work very well giving a sense of movement)

I expect you have a combination of both, and may be camera shake as well.

Shutter speed I would expect you would need 250th of a second to be safe (don't go any slower), faster is even better if there's a lot of movement. Focusing well depending on both your camera and where on the football field and speed of the action etc so the automatic focusing may not be able to keep up?

While I use Nikon I'm not familiar with the D5000, sport setting sounds like a good start the manual should also provide some help.

Otherwise try shutter priority and set the shutter speed to say 500th and ISO say 800 (or higher say 1250), and let the camera sort out the aperture. Let the auto focus do its job and see if that helps. You can also turn off the auto focus, manually focus on a particular point and take the picture when the players are at that distance / place on the pitch.

The camera does record a set of information for each image so you can check, shutter speed etc which will give you key information, if you have kept the images check what the settings are - you might find the answer there.

Also practice using the camera, to start with just taking pics of objects and zoom in,? Can you get a nice sharp image of a static object? If not back to basics till you can. If you can try tracking a car an keeping it in the frame and get a sharp image. It might be you are trying to move the camera to keep your son in frame but the autofocus can't keep up.

I'm presuming the lens has VR, check to see if that is turned on.

If all of this fails - find some one who actually know how to use a camera, (you might have to suffer a long explanation - if it is long then the chances are they don't know enough).

Having worked as a professional photographer setting up the camera is instinctive and easy to show someone on their camera - but difficult to diagnose without seeing an image and key information such as exposure.