college soccer at night

i take photos for my school newspaper, and my photos last night were very grainy and dark due to poor lighting and not being about to open up more than 5.6 on my 28-135.

the photo editor was able to clean my images up last night so they were brighter but of course there was still some grainyness due to having to use such a high ISO.

my settings last night were 135mm @ f/5.6 and 1/160th and they were just light enough to see people, i was able to increase the exposure in lightroom and they looked fine when not viewed at full size 18MP.

my question is, i am taking pictures again tonight how bad of an idea would it be to maybe take the pictures on my 50mm so i can actually open up to maybe f/3.0 so i can let more light through the lens to not have such a high ISO or will the focal length be too short and i wont be able to crop or blow any of the images up?

this is one sample with above settings mentioned after increasing exposure in lightroom. no other PP was done, the final version i dont have looked good after PP but i want to make sure i have more quality images even though i dont have much to work with, it might not be able to be done. but thats why i come to you guys. thanks for any feedback and suggestions.

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

First, the 28-135 isn't a sports lens and is especially not a night sports lens. It isn't fast enough or long enough. If you throw your 50 1.8 on, you're going to have to do A LOT of cropping. Even at 18MP, you're not going to produce quality images. If you're shooting for the college, you should ask them about using their equipment. You're lens line-up just won't cut it for night sports. You can also look through the "flash night football" thread for some inspiration, too.

The way you are approaching this is unfortunately a non-starter. With anything more than a 2.8 lens and anything less than 200 mm you are going to have problems. Some of my recent stuff under those conditions were shot at iSO of 6400 and above. That is to keep you at a maximum of 1/1250.