Personally I would recommend the Canon HV30. This camera is the sucessor to Canon’s immensely popular and successful HV20. This camera is a nice size and form factor and takes beautiful 1080p video recorded onto MiniDV. For any sports recording where your camera gets jarred and banged a lot I would recommend MiniDV or some kind of solid state memory, as hard drives don’t last long under those conditions. This camcorder records in 30p so your footage will be nice and clean and smooth, even with fast motion, unlike many other consumer camcorders. Also this camera features a 24p mode so the fps (frames per second) will match that of film, giving your image a more film like look and feel. Of course the image quality is also excellent with very accurate, vivid colors, and excellent Full HD quality. The sound is also very nice and you can add an external microphone if you want. Really for the consumer HD market the Canon HV30 is one of the best, and at a price point of only $600 on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Canon-HV30-Definition-Camcorder-Stabilized/dp/B00114PN1U/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1238298165&sr=8-1 it falls firmly within your budget range. If you get this camera, I know you wont be disappointed.

PS- A side note/warning about HD camcorders. HD requires significant computer horsepower to edit and process. A computer with a minimum of a 2.4ghz P4 or a 2.0 Core 2 Duo processor with at least 2gb of ram is basically the minimum required to work with footage from any HD camcorder. Also new editing software (such as the latest version of Sony’s Vegas) will be required to edit the footage. If you don’t have a computer powerful enough to work with this footage you will either need to get a new computer or else not edit the footage and keep it on tape. Hope this helps.

Sony is the best and most trustworthy brand around. I mean, my dad had a camcorder from them 20 years ago ahah and it still works great. HD camcorders from sony can be seen at sony.com