From Bronze to Champions: Filming San Carlos United's Decade-Long Climb

On a Monday night in April 2024, under the lights at Highlands Park in San Carlos, a group of eighteen-year-olds practiced together the way they had since they were seven. It was their final season. Ten of the original thirty who had tried out as kids were still there — and by then they were champions of the ECNL Regional League, the highest level their climb could reach.

My job that night was to make the film that explained how they got there.

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One team, ten years, every rung of the ladder

The film was made for NorCal Premier Soccer's Community Spotlight series — and it was a first for the series. The Spotlights had opened with a club story (Sheriffs FC); San Carlos United's 2006 Girls were the first single team featured.

Their story is the NorCal system working exactly as designed. The team started at the Bronze level and climbed every rung — Silver, Gold, State Premier, the NPL — before winning the Spring 2023 ECNL-RL championship. It was not a straight line. For three straight years they fell just short of the NPL, and broke through on the fourth try, winning the NPL West and a league title — the first team in the club's roughly fifty-year history to reach that level.

What made them unusual wasn't only the climb. It was who climbed. San Carlos United is a community club in the literal sense: an arrangement with the city keeps the roster overwhelmingly local — about 90% of the players are from San Carlos itself — and that local base is what underpins the club's access to fields. Coach Nick Dye started the age group with around sixty players, shaped it to thirty, and coached them for a decade. He is still, in the film, slightly amazed by it: he started coaching them at thirty, and finished at forty, having become a father twice along the way.

And the club let them be kids while it happened. Players could play other sports and play for their high schools. The film's argument — made by the people in it, not by narration — is that the two things were connected: a team that stays together because it is rooted somewhere can survive three years of losing finals.

One night to shoot it

The whole film was shot in a single evening: Monday, April 15, 2024, at Highlands Park, from 7 to 10 p.m. Interviews came first, in the early part of the evening — Nick, then the players — and then I filmed the practice session under the lights until ten. Every interviewee signed a media release before we rolled.

An interview plan for a night like that can't be a script. I worked from a written set of questions — nineteen for Nick, twelve for the players, six for parents — built to guide a conversation rather than pin anyone to answers. With teenage athletes you get one honest pass at a question, so the questions have to be ordered so the easy ones (how long have you played together?) earn the harder ones (what will you take from this when it's over?).

Ten years of a team's life can't be filmed in one night, though. The early years — the Bronze and Silver seasons, the first trophies — exist in the film the way they exist for the families: as photographs. The team's own archive carries that part of the story, presented as photographs, so the film keeps cutting between the seven-year-olds they were and the eighteen-year-olds under the lights. A documentary about a long climb should feel like memory, and memory looks like a shoebox of photos as much as it looks like footage.

A league voice in the middle

The finished film is bigger than one team's story. NorCal's Director of Competitions, Dan Chamberlain, was interviewed at the State Cup on June 2, 2024 — weeks after the main shoot — and his interview became the film's middle chapter (it begins at 4:41). Dan explains the merit-based promotion-and-relegation structure that made the climb possible: placement based on performance, competitive divisions where any team can win on the day, and a real pathway for a community club to reach the top. His point is the film's point: their story "is possible because of the environment that they exist in."

He also gives the film its closing idea — that for the players, what lasts is the journey, not the trophy they got to lift. That's the difference a league's voice makes. Without it, this is a lovely film about one team. With it, the film is evidence for the system the league runs — something NorCal can forward to any club wondering what the pathway is for.

What a film like this is for

NorCal published the film in September 2024, alongside its own written feature on the team. A spotlight like this does a few jobs at once for an organization: it shows member clubs what the pathway looks like when it works; it gives a club like San Carlos a permanent record of a once-in-a-generation team; and it is forwardable — a coach or director can send it to a board member, a city partner, or a new family and let ten minutes make the argument.

If your club or league has a team, a season, or a milestone that deserves that treatment, the process looks like the one above: one well-planned shoot, interviews built as conversations, your own archive welcomed in, and an edit that treats your athletes the way you'd want them treated.

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Production notes

• Client: NorCal Premier Soccer (Community Spotlight series — first Team Spotlight)
• Shoot: April 15, 2024, Highlands Park, San Carlos (interviews + evening practice); additional interview June 2, 2024 (Dan Chamberlain, State Cup)
• Roles: Filmed and edited by Leomar Moring
• Client approval: Desiree Hankerson's reply to the final cut was one word — "Okey."
• Published by NorCal: September 2024 — "Community Spotlight: The Rise of San Carlos United"