The Long Way Up

Every Community Spotlight starts with the same problem: the story already happened.

By the time NorCal Premier Soccer asked me to make this film, the Folsom Lake Surf 2011 Boys had already done the thing — started outside the NPL, climbed the NorCal ladder one promotion at a time, and finished the run by winning an ECNL RL National Championship. My job wasn't to cover the climb. It was to rebuild it, honestly, in under five minutes.

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I shot the film in one day, and it stands on one voice: Fritz Libby, Folsom Lake Surf's Executive Director, on the field, telling it straight. One interview was the design — the film lets the man who leads the club narrate its climb, and lets everything else be pictures. And a day spent around the team bears him out. How they actually train, how they are with each other at the field — that was the part that stayed with me: watching it happen a few feet from where Fritz stood, describing it.

Everything the film remembers came from the team's own archive, sent over by Desiree Hankerson at NorCal — years of snapshots, the same boys growing from little kids into the teenagers who lifted the trophy. The climb took a childhood, and the only footage of most of it is those photographs. So the film treats them as footage: they arrive in collages, stacked the way memory stacks. Of everything in the archive, that's what stayed with me — watching the team grow up inside a folder of other people's pictures.

A few sequences run inside a camera's viewfinder — shutter speed, aperture, the red REC light. Take the huddle: the boys folded in shoulder to shoulder, one of them mid-sentence, hand up, holding the floor. That was a choice I made to show how this team actually is with each other — the way Fritz describes them when he talks about the group. The film keeps catching them mid-gesture, mid-laugh, mid-huddle: being a team rather than performing one.

And the biggest moment in the film is one I never saw. I wasn't at the final. The trophy-lift photograph arrived with the rest of the archive, from Desiree — the whole team underneath the trophy, squinting into the sun. A director usually protects the climax of his film with his own camera. This one I received, and the film is honest about that if you know how it was made: one day of shooting, one man's memory, and a folder of photographs, cut together until it felt like the run itself. Three cuts, shaped by Desiree's notes, got it there.

Not bad for a team that started outside the ladder, looking in.

Client — NorCal Premier Soccer. Director / Cinematographer / Editor — Leomar Moring. Archive photography — Folsom Lake Surf team archive, via Desiree Hankerson.