It takes only one person to believe in something to make it happen. For the Northern Soccer League, it took a collection of women who were used to be being told ‘no’ and kept fighting for their space.
When soccer Olympian Diana Matheson retired, she set out to build the professional soccer league. Matheson built the world she wanted to live in, one where there is investment in women’s soccer, and where women won’t be told that they don’t belong on the field.
When director Michèle Hozer first found about the project, she thought it would be a good story to follow, but it wasn’t what she was anticipating.
“I thought, unlike documentary, anything that has to do with sports has tons of money involved in it. This was going to be easy, or some big corporation was going to be behind the league,” she said.
She was in for a surprise, realizing that there wasn’t big corporate money backing the formation of this league and the work rested on the shoulders of a former player.
But that’s what made the story so compelling. There was turmoil in the sport world, Soccer Canada was having a reckoning, and even sport in general was undergoing change. Hozer felt she walked into the setup of a hero’s journey, and that’s what drew her to the project.
Matheson struggled to convince people of her vision. There are still people who believe that the world isn’t interested in watching women play sports. Building a league of six teams was so hard, and over the course of three years of filming, Hozer was plugged in.
“You don’t [usually] land a story as a filmmaker with so much emotional drama,” she said.
Drama and adversity. Women’s sports still faces so much adversity because people aren’t willing to invest in it because there is a belief that people won’t pay to watch women play.
“Imagine if you said that about doctors or lawyers? There isn’t a place for female lawyers to practice, you’ll have to go international. We wouldn’t accept it in any other industry, but we accept it in sports,” Hozer said.
One of the difficulties of all projects for Hozer was carrying the financial weight of the work. TVO agreed to fund the project but Hozer had to locate other funding while still filming.
Hozer hopes that the documentary, like the league, starts to normalize that there are avenues for women to play soccer at the professional level. It’s starting to change, but women were finished in their sports once they finished post secondary education.
“These kids can look at a film like this and see their heroes,” she said.
The Pitch promises to be a story of triumph and perseverance. A story about making dreams a reality against all odds. Maybe there will be a time when women don’t have to fight for space that was already owed to them. This is just the beginning.
The Pitch is part of the Calgary International Film Festival. The Alberta Premiere of the film will run on Tuesday, September 23rd. Visit CIFF’s website for tickets and more information.