No guarantees, but you might try:
1- a higher iso
2- a wider aperture
3-carrying extra batteries
4-batteres with a higher amph rating

Thanks for your reply and ideas. I will try a higher ISO this weekend at our local high school football game and see what happens. Usual use 200 but will try 400 and see what happens. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

If you plan to shoot football, recycle time is the least of your problems. I just checked on your camera's specifications, and the reach of your flash is only about 16 feet- maximum. I expect that is in a room with light walls. A football field is around 160 feet wide if you are shooting straight across and standing as close to the sidelines as physically possible.

If you have access to shoot from the field, you probably need to be back a few yards from the sidelines, so there is no way you can use your flash without drastic underexposure - five yards outdoors and you have probably gone beyond its maximum. You would be lucky to get a very dark picture of the nearest wide receiver, with the rest of the field lost in darkness.

If you have watched the SuperBowl or any other football game that takes place at night, you will see no flash units on the journalist's cameras covering it. Yes, the stadiums are brighter than high-school fields, but that is not the reason.

First, light drops off on the square of the distance. If you had a flash powerful enough to properly light the quarterback, the wide receiver near you would be a large blown out highlight with no detail, and the receiver across the field would be dreadfully underexposed. Simple laws of physics. To get anything like usable light, you would need a bank of super-powered flash units up where the stadium lights are.

The far more serious reason, is that when playing football at night, the player's pupils are as wide open as they can be. If he is running to make a catch and some dork pops the flash when he is looking directly at it, he will be blinded for a while. At best, the flash may change the outcome of the game, and possibly the championship. At worst, the player can not see where he is going and is injured for the season or for life - and you don't even get a good photograph for all this.