More Than Soccer: Filming Merced United's Leadership Academy

Most youth soccer films are about soccer. This one is about everything a soccer club can carry besides soccer — because Merced United built a second program inside the club, a Leadership Academy, and the film's job was to explain why it exists and what it does.

The academy takes players off the field and into their own city. Sessions have put the 2008 girls — the team the program piloted with — inside local businesses to hear how they were built and what nearly broke them, at City Hall to learn how a city council actually runs, and on a tour of UC Merced, a university some of them had never set foot in despite growing up in town. Between those visits: how a credit score works, how to open a bank account, how to fill out a FAFSA, how to write a résumé. The premise, stated plainly by the people running it, is that very few players turn professional — so a club owes them more than training.

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The president's story is the program's story

The film opens over Merced — an aerial of the town, then its downtown streets — and a narrator introduces Jovan Pulido, the club's president. His route to that role is the emotional spine of the piece, and he tells it himself: born and raised in Merced, he was born with a condition that caused kidney failure in childhood, went through transplants and years of dialysis, and found his way back to purpose when a nephew signed him up — unasked — to coach a recreational team. Coaching led to running the recreational program, and the recreational program led to the presidency of the Merced Soccer Association.

That biography matters to the film because the Leadership Academy came out of the same instinct. Pulido and the club's vice president looked at the world's great youth academies — Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax — and at what those places wrap around the football: schooling, structure, formation. Their local version asks what a Central Valley club can wrap around soccer for kids whose families may not have a roadmap for college or business. The program is funded through city grants the club applied for, and local businesses host sessions for free. As Pulido tells it, the aim is belief as much as information: players who have stood in a council chamber or a university lecture hall are more likely to believe those places are for them.

One evening, a working session

The film was shot in a single evening — Tuesday, May 28, 2024, from 4:00 to 8:30 p.m. in downtown Merced, with Sean Ayres crewing alongside me. The schedule was built around the program rather than around the camera: interviews first, then a real academy session — the players visiting a downtown boutique run by their own team manager, Kylie Fimbros, herself a former Merced United player who now manages and assistant-coaches her daughter's team — and downtown b-roll as the light went.

That structure decides what the film can honestly claim. Because the session was real, the players on camera aren't performing enthusiasm for a program they heard about that day; they're mid-conversation with a business owner they know. The interviews carry the same quality. Head coach George Olivares talks about what he sees on the field since the academy started — players who communicate better and connect better, girls who were quiet coming out of their shells. The players say versions of the same thing. And Fimbros makes the case for representation: in a sport long dominated by men, girls need women on the touchline they can actually talk to.

A short narration track ties the evening together. With one shoot and a program this wide — businesses, city government, a university, financial basics — the voiceover does the geography so the interviews can stay personal.

What a program film is for

NorCal published the film in July 2025, as part of its Community Spotlight series. A film like this does different work than a team spotlight. The San Carlos film says: look what the pathway produces. This one says: look what a club can build — and it is explicitly an invitation. The people in it keep returning to the same point, that other clubs could start versions of this, beginning small, with one team whose coach and parents buy in. For a prospective member club, a city partner, or a funder, seven minutes of the program's own president, coach, manager, and players making that case is worth more than a brochure describing it.

If your club runs something beyond soccer — a leadership program, a scholarship fund, a mentoring scheme — it deserves the same treatment: film it while it's working, let the people who built it explain why, and let the participants say what changed. That's the story other organizations will forward.

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Production notes

• Client: NorCal Premier Soccer (Community Spotlight series)
• Shoot: May 28, 2024, downtown Merced (interviews, a Leadership Academy business session with players, and b-roll); crew of two — Leomar Moring with Sean Ayres
• Roles: Directed, filmed and edited by Leomar Moring
• Published by NorCal: July 24, 2025 — "Community Spotlight: Merced United Leadership Academy" (7:16)