Location and lens are really the most important determinants of good sports photography and then practice and experience fill in the rest of the blanks.
I like shooting in full manual mode (lens wide open, shutter speed fast enough to freeze motion) but with ISO set to auto to provide for a standard exposure. An important difference in metering modes is in evaluative metering, exposure is locked when focus is achieved with the half shutter push while the other two modes set exposure at the time of capture.
You will find that selecting a single focus point is likely to work best as you gain experience, it takes some of the "thinking" load from the camera to you. Even with the very advanced AF system of the 1DX III, I will be shooting football tonight with a single focus point. This is even more valuable with less advanced AF systems and slower focusing lenses.
Also, it is good to gain experience with the lag time between fully depressing the shutter release and when the image is captured. Even in cameras with a very fast frame per second rate, timing is still critical in sports. This is one of my major dislike of mirrorless cameras because of lag between what is seen and what is actually taking place on the field which makes capture timing more difficult and because I shoot football with both eyes open, it creates a real time view in one eye and a lag time view through the camera. That doesn't bother me as much using video cameras which are what gave birth to mirrorless "still" cameras but it isn't something I like for sports photography.
Rodger
EOS 1DX M3, 1DX M2, 1DX, 5DS R, M6 Mark II, 1D M2, EOS 650 (film), many lenses, XF400 video
