Twenty Years, Three Founders: Filming the Story of NorCal Premier Soccer

Most organizations let their founding story dissolve into retellings. By year twenty, it belongs to whoever tells it loudest at the holiday party. NorCal Premier Soccer decided to fix its version on the record instead: one film, nine and a half minutes, told entirely by the three men who started it.

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An accidental beginning, on purpose

The film opens with an admission: the founding, one of them says, was "quite accidental." In the spring of 2004, Benjamin Ziemer, Shawn Blakeman, and Paolo Bonomo launched a soccer league across Northern California — roughly 120 teams at the U11 through U13 levels — because the existing options didn't serve the players in front of them. Their early ambition, as they tell it, was modest and durable: build something that would turn kids into lifelong fans of the game.

Two decisions from that first season shaped everything that followed, and both are load-bearing in the film. The league would run on merit — promotion and relegation based on results, from day one, for ten-year-olds as much as anyone. And its Player Development Program would be free, starting with the first identification camp in the summer of 2005. The founders then volunteered for the league's first seven years.

By the time the film was made, in the league's twentieth year, NorCal reported 275 clubs, 5,800 teams, and 125,000 players. The film doesn't dwell on those numbers. It dwells on the three people in the chairs — because the numbers are available anywhere, and the founders' version of the beginning is available nowhere else.

One interview day, three memories

The interviews were filmed on April 15, 2024 — the same day, and the same trip, as the San Carlos United Community Spotlight shoot. The production plan (a shared shot list and schedule, circulated that morning) treated the two films as one day of work with two distinct editorial jobs: the Spotlight is a story about a team told by its coach and players; the anniversary film is a story about an institution told only by its founders.

That restriction — founders only — is the film's discipline and its credibility. There are no players, no parents, no outside experts. Three people who were in the room in 2004 reconstruct the room: why a new league, why merit-based, what the resistance looked like, what they'd do the same way again. Where their memories are doing different work — one on the idea, one on the opposition, one on the building — the edit lets the story pass between them rather than forcing a single narrator.

A history film like this also has to survive fact-checking from people who were there and people who weren't. Everything the founders claim on camera is checkable against the league's own published history, and the film stays inside what they can personally vouch for. That's what makes it usable: NorCal can send it to a prospective member club, a sponsor, or a new staff member without a single line needing an asterisk.

The final cut went to NorCal on August 20, 2024 — with a square-format thank-you cut alongside it for social — and the league published the film two days later.

What an anniversary film is for

A founding-story film is not nostalgia. For NorCal it does specific work: it gives 275 member clubs a shared account of where the league came from; it shows prospective clubs and partners the principles — merit, access, volunteer-built — that the organization still runs on; and it preserves, in the founders' own voices, the part of the institution that cannot be reconstructed later. Interviews with founders are the one shoot that gets more valuable and less possible every year.

If your organization has a milestone coming — an anniversary, a founding generation retiring, a merger that needs a shared story — the recipe from this production is straightforward: put the people who were there on camera, and restrict the film to what they can vouch for. Do it while "we should really record this someday" is still a plan and not a regret.

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Production notes

• Client: NorCal Premier Soccer
• Opening: the film begins with a dedication card to the league's former and current volunteer board members and the thousands of players, coaches, referees, volunteers, organizers and family members behind the twenty years
• Shoot: April 15, 2024 (founders' interviews, shared production day with the San Carlos United Spotlight)
• Roles: Filmed and edited by Leomar Moring
• Delivered: final cut sent August 20, 2024 (film + 1080×1080 thank-you social cut)
• Client approval: Desiree Hankerson's reply to the final cut was one word — "Okey."
• Published by NorCal: August 22, 2024 — "Celebrating 20 Years of NorCal Premier Soccer"