New Non League America Documentary Released
Non League America has been the only consistent producer of visual lower league soccer content in the United States for the last 10 years (almost). Yet for all Steve Bayley and his team have produced, it seems that many only know the social media side of the video juggernaut. Time to change all that. Non League America released Non League America Vol. 15: More Than Ready this morning, so we sat down with Steve to discuss his newest film, NLA as a whole, and what’s next for the group of documentary film makers.
For people who don't know what NLA does, can you talk about who you are and the vision of NLA?
Non League America is a platform for exploring the diversity of the United States through the lens of soccer. Our mission is help unlock the potential this country has in the sport by relentlessly advocating for systemic change in our country's soccer system. We want to empower community minded clubs to think bigger. We aim to deconstruct myths perpetuated by those in power within the soccer industry in this country that there is not enough interest to sustain an open system, and to share information about all the opportunities that an open system would provide for grassroots clubs. Myths like there are not enough clubs, not enough cities, not enough opportunities, not enough money flowing in the system to justify a different vision, a vision that encompasses the idea that amateur soccer teams, if well managed and marketed, have the same opportunity to grow like any other business. But rather than just sit around and complain all day on twitter, we are building a massive case study of sorts on the size and scope of the actual soccer landscape. I call our approach ethnotainment. Our documentaries are half ethnographic qualitative research pieces, and half entertainment. I apply my skils from working as a strategist and market researcher in advertising agencies to the soccer landscape. We want to show up close and personal the stories of clubs who are attempting to succeed against long odds, and humanize the people behind the endless streams of logos that populate the timelines of soccer junkies like ourselves on twitter. These are the people the current soccer system in this country is designed to exclude. These are the people that in almost every other country in the world would have an opportunity to build equity in their clubs in addition to meaningful relationships in their communities. They deserve to have their stories told. Sharing these stories helps people see that change is possible. A side benefit is it also keeps the twitter trolls away! No one can ever say to us, well why don't you get up off your phone and do something about it.
How long have you been doing this? What projects stand out looking back?
It's been a long, slow burning blunt man. Non League America started as what's known as a "groundhopping blog" back in January of 2012. I had several years of pent up soccer energy having been working on a car lot while going back to school for a masters degree, so I had very little free time. I worked every Saturday and every other Sunday so I could never make it out to games. I was watching a lot of Fox Soccer Channel on TV at the time and was seeing all these cool little stadiums on FA Cup games like Torquay and Bristol Rovers, and even the USL games they had like the Wilmington Hammerheads and there was just an incredible energy coming through the TV screen I was desperate to tap into. After about three years on the car lot I decided I had both had enough and saved enough, so in the late fall of 2011, with some extra time on my hands, I fell down some wikipedia k-holes, got deep into blogger and became enamored with an English groundhopping blog called "Adventures in Tinpot" where this guy traveled to remote football grounds with very small attendances and took pictures with cheeky captions and did little match writeups and attendance counts. At the same time, I discovered thecup.us and learned that we actually had our own version of the FA Cup in the US Open Cup and there were all these weird little amateur teams who competed in the US Open Cup with the MLS and USL teams, but there was nowhere to find information about these clubs beyond the game recaps on the site. I was wondering, what are these clubs home leagues like? Are there fans? I started volunteering for Josh writing some game recaps, calling coaches of teams in the Maryland Major Soccer League, who had a particularly lengthy qualifying process, and getting goal scorers and basic info over the phone. It was just all so dry and transactional. It was Tinpot minus the Adventures; so I decided to start a blogger called Deep In The Pyramid and go out in my home state of Massachusetts and attempt to find some. I wanted to put an American spin on Adventures in Tinpot, and I didn't see anyone else doing something like that at the time. I got the idea to try and attend 100 games at all levels of competition in the year. I wanted to find the tiny fields with the big crowds. What I ended up finding was mostly empty fields and small crowds, but I did get to travel to some interesting corners of New England and I think I got just over 40 games in that first year. Mixed into those 40 games was a sizeable number of New England Revolution games as well. This is before I learned what a roadblock MLS is to the development of these lower division clubs of course, but it was through attending those games I was exposed to supporter culture in person, and where I met my partner in Non League America, Chris Reid. As the blog started to get a little traction, I was applying to advertising school. One of the assignments was to create a short video about something you're passionate about. I bought a little camcorder and a monopod and I started taking video footage of all these obscure local matches I was attending under the nom de plume "The Soccer Watcher" and uploading them to YouTube. I made a video for the ad school application and then just kept making them. There was very little commentary and subpar editing skills, but I just felt that I was onto something. At the same time, I'm seeing the supporter culture in these other lower leagues start to blow up. I'm on YouTube looking at the crowds Chattanooga is getting and the Atlanta Silverbacks are getting, and even these latino matches out in LA that were broadcast on some site I can't even remember the name of anymore, but they were poppin! There was like over 1000 people out at these lower division matches and here I am taking attendance counts of like 17, 26, 9. I had already been plotting a move back South to break into the advertising industry, but I was getting all my ducks in a row. In late 2013 I moved to Atlanta and that's when I started getting access to these bigger lower league crowds. That's also when I came up with the idea of creating documentaries telling club specific stories, and numbering them like the old hip hop DVD's like "The Come Up" series and mixtape series like DJ Chuck T's "Down South Slangin'" that were so popular in like 2003-2008 when I was dabbling around the edges of the rap game and radio industry. The transition from game footage to documentaries was really catalyzed by Abram Chamberlain who I knew online extensively from the New England Revolution universe. He asked me if he could put a documentary he was making about the club he supported, Pensacola FC, that folded mid-season and left all the players in the lurch. It sounded like a really important story to tell, and I was flattered that he wanted to use my blog to tell it. That was the first documentary that went up on the blog. Abram made the whole thing, I had nothing to do with it other than providing a place for him to publish it. It was around that time that I changed the name of the blog from Deep In The Pyramid, to the only slightly less esoteric Non League America. The dream was always to get a wrapped SUV (same rap game inspiration) and just travel the country looking for the soccer, but I was also trying to establish a toehold in the advertising industry, and my wife and I had our first baby on the way. In order to overcome that barrier, I had the idea of creating a network of correspondents around the country based on people I knew off of soccer twitter, and I would mail them a camcorder, give them an assignment, and have them mail me back the footage which I would then edit in imovie. That's how Non League America Vol. 1 about San Fancisco City FC's US Open Cup match vs. Cal FC was created. Huge thanks to Evan Ream for doing that project. One aspect I need to mention here is that I never wanted to take advantage of people. I saw all these people doing really cool and substantial projects in the grassroots soccer world on spec or for some nebulous future opportunity which never seems to materialize and I've always lived by the philosophy that you create the world you want to live in. Economies are created by circulating money in communities, so if we want to create an independent economy, we have to spend money with each other. That's been Non League America's philosophy from day one. Am I paying people what they deserve? No. Am I paying them market rates, probably not, but every project I put out, every freelancer who works on something for Non League America is getting some money, and they're getting it quickly. I sent another camera to a guy in Kentucky that I never got back, which made me reconsider the approach! During this era, Chris and I also bought an SUV with the intention of wrapping it, but when I went to get quotes on wraps they were way beyond my budget. I did drive the unwrapped Silver Lincoln Aviator to all the NLA volumes I shot, and then the truck needed some work, and it ended up parked in my driveway actually for a couple years (much to my wife's chagrin). During that era of NLA documentaries, which we affectionately refer to as "The Lost Tapes" I put together a couple docs down South, and Chris put together a couple up North. We learned from each other about what worked and what didn't, and we put together a total of 6 decent numbered volumes in the series, several interviews from footage which didn't quite meet the standard for a cohesive narrative to deserve a number, and 1 subpar numbered piece that I threw in there because we had been in a long content slump and I hoped by throwing something out there we would get back on track.
During this time, Copa 90 was blowing up all over the world, and it was clear that my rambling imovie efforts were not gonna cut it if we wanted to be taken seriously. I started thinking about what it would look like to bring in a Director. I had been interested in the supporter owned movement from the start of the numbered series, which is why we kicked off our first volume with San Francisco City FC. We had been keeping tabs on Bearfight FC and their supporter owned movement as well. Totally separate from my soccer obsession, I had become a huge fan of an urban culture podcast based out of Wilmington, Delaware called Church For The Wild. One of the co-hosts of the podcast, Jamisa was a videographer and Director. She had directed several music videos for rap artists out of Delaware, and since hip hop has always been my cultural lens, and the lens I also wanted for Non League America, and the fact that this punk inspired (which is Chris' lens) supporter owned club, Bearfight FC was in the same city as Jamisa, I had the idea, let's hire Jamisa to make a documentary about Bearfight FC. At the time, Jamisa also had another side hustle called The Honey's Cocina, where she was making and selling taco's with a partner of hers. I figured if she needed any more convincing, because I didn't know if she knew anything about soccer, (she didn't) I could close the deal by offering her a second revenue stream on the day, and Bearfight would appreciate the contribution to their gameday experience. In the end, Jamisa was obviously with it, and so was Jeremy and all the folks at Bearfight. They all have tremendous pride in their city, and I remember even some of the guys on the team knew Jamisa's brother, shooting the interviews at the bar it was like old home week. The plan was to film a preseason friendly at Eden Park in Wilmington. The game was significant because Bearfight, although they had been around for several years, playing in a Philadelphia area league, had not been able to secure a home field in their home city. The field didn't have goals. Jeremy had to truck goals in from out of town and set them up, the field conditions were atrocious, and truthfully there was no field. The Bearfight guys lined the whole field the morning of the match. I drove up to Delaware from Atlanta, and Chris drove down from Massachusetts. We live streamed the match from our phones by tying a monopod to a chain link fence. A coworker of mine at the ad agency I worked at made the flyers. It was literally Punk Football and it was beautiful.
That experience took a lot of money, and a lot of effort. It was just a lot of resources that had to come together to make that happen, but the difference in results from our previous imovie stuff was immediately apparent. We made an impact. I remember like the day after dropped the video our twitter was going crazy because we had never done anything that professional before. There were even other people trying to ride off our momentum. Bearfight had not made any video content prior to our event and the next day I check into the timeline and some other guy is interviewing Jeremy in a whole separate video. We have always been innovators. Sometimes to a fault. There's been numerous times in my life when i've been too far ahead of the curve to maximize an opportunity. Coming out of that, I wanted to do something even bigger and better. I had to lay low for a bit and get my funds back up and plan it right for the next one. During that year, 2017, Providence City FC was emerging on twitter as the force we know them as today, but people still didn't know too much about the actual club beyond it's twitter presence. Coming from New England, I had been familiar with their story. Remember the roots of the blog were in the Bay State Soccer League and New England US Open Cup Qualifying. Our first big transitional moment came when we threw a breakfast tailgate at the 2012 Massachusetts US Open Cup Region 1 Qualifying Final. The night before had been a Revs fans and players charity video game tournament at a bar in Boston and I got on the mic and announced the breakfast tailgate. We had about 10 people from our group show up the next morning, and we had bloody mary's and omelets cooked on a grill next to a high school field in Roxbury. The game was between Providence City's ancestor club, East Providence Sports and Mass Premier Soccer, now known as GPS Omens. The video highlights of that game are still on my personal YouTube. I tweet it out every couple of years. There's a lot of funny banter in the video from local New England supporter luminaries like Chris Camille of Groton House FC "Pizza Boys" fame and the original New England podcasting legend Hank Alexandre of The Midnight Ride. MPS won the match in a shootout and ended up making their way through the Region 1 bracket into the US Open Cup, securing a match with GPS Portland Phoenix which was also covered on the original blog.
So anyway, Providence City is the shit, and I wanted to tell their story, so we brought back Jamisa in 2018 for a more ambitious project. This was the first project where she embedded with the team over an entire month, filming 4 or 5 matches and getting interviews away from the field. We wanted to be there when they stretched themselves to play NPSL competition in Hartford City FC and Stockade FC. Just those games taking place was like a win for supporters of the local and regional league movement, which has been the last bastion of limited supporter culture in this country. The scope of that doc dwarfed the Bearfight project, but really made me think anything was possible. Now that we pulled that off, I'm looking at finally realizing one of my secret missions with Non League America, really documenting some of these unsanctioned ethnic tournaments and leagues. Now we had some real momentum and in the second half of 2018 Jamisa was flying all over the place. We shot the Vietnamese tournament in Houston in collaboration with Alfonso Bui, the Director of the Lee Nguyen story and a lot of the fed's Open Cup videos, now he's the video man behind Oakland Roots. At one point Jamisa was on multiple leg trips flying city to city doing multiple projects out on the road. I think from Houston she was out shooting in Alabama with some HBCU programs for the first part of our planned HBCU soccer documentary: "Black College Football". She shot with Talladega College Men and some game footage of the Alabama State vs. Alabama A&M women's game. From there she was down in Florida shooting with Himmarshee FC and Gold Coast Inter AFC, now The Breakers. That was all one massive run at the end of 2018. Earlier that fall before flying out, Jamisa had done another long term embed with Super Delegates FC of Maryland on their US Open Cup Qualifying run. Then we did the UPSL Atlanta Caribbean Division doc, and finally, Goldsboro came on the tail end of that massive 1 year run from Spring 2018 to Spring 2019.
At that point budget issues really slowed the whole machine down. Goldsboro was another long term embed project. I've found that there are much richer storytelling opportunities when you stick with a club over the long haul vs. a one day in and out event based project. That said, some of the one day projects have been among our most popular. The Atlanta Caribbean Soccer League doc got heavy traction on our facebook page when we started promoting it to the Jamaican community, both in the United States and in Jamaica. Facebook's targeting capabilities are fascinating and have really allowed us to connect with our intended audiences and given our docs a second life during the pandemic, vs. some of the more limited traction they've gotten originally on YouTube.
How do you decide what stories to prioritize? What are the criteria?
There are a couple different angles we look at when selecting story opportunities. We love to highlight stories about diverse communities. I am a firm believer that the magic of the United States lies in its diversity. It's also what separates soccer from every other sport in this country. It doesn't have one core audience the sport is culturally identified with. Soccer in the United States is like the third Goodie Mob album, it's a World Party! I've always been a fan of going way down the rabbit hole, and I've always been a voracious reader. My dad was a high school librarian. A thirst for knowledge is in my blood. In school my best subject was always social studies, history, or geography, whichever one was rotated in that year. Couple that academic orientation with an unhealthy obsession with hip hop from the age of about 9, and you quickly end up in a place where I'm getting a steady stream of Black political views pumped into my subconscious. So that appreciation for the power of diversity and a strong anti-racist bent has been in me my whole life. Like all white people I have some level of latent racism that is built into my genetic memory structure I'm always guarded against, but my overarching life mission is to be bridge builder between races vs. being a racial triangulator, that has historically been a problematic role white people have occupied in pitting minority groups against each other.
When you do a lot of reading about race, ultimately it comes back to self-determination. No one race or ethnicity should be holding power or presiding over another. I believe that the promise of an open system and promotion and relegation for independent minority owned clubs would give those businesses equity they are currently denied in our soccer power structure. The soccer power structure mimics that of the nation as whole, with rich white men on top denying others the same opportunities. Not only does a closed system rob these clubs of the opportunity to pair cultural pride with tangible equity, it also prevents them from accessing training compensation and solidarity payments which could sustain clubs and allow them to be rewarded for investing in the youth of their communities. Diversity is the first lens.
Super Eagles FC take a celebratory picture after a match.
The second lens is possible supporter ownership, and if not supporter ownership, at least an uncommonly deep connection between the players and each other and the players and the community that supports them. We see that community connection on display for example in the Super Delegates doc and in the attendance they get at their annual community fundraiser.
The third lens we look at is online clout. Who is making noise on soccer twitter that it seems people are desperate to know more about? How can we make this logo in a twitter bubble real for people.
The fourth and final lens I look at is as simple as a personal connection. Am I interested in telling this story? Am I motivated to invest my limited resources and time in ensuring that this story gets told. That's actually a pretty high bar to clear, but chances are if a club has already satisfied at least one of those previous three lenses and preferably two, it’s probably something I'd consider worth pursuing.
What's the typical timeline for your documentaries? Can you talk about the typical workflow projects like these?
As far as overall, I don't think there is a typical timeline. Unfortunately, these projects have to fit in around my primary job which I typically work about 50-60 hours a week at, and my family obligations as a husband and father to three girls, who are 6, 4, and 2. The obvious reasons why projects get delayed are money and time. When both are in short supply, this has to take a back seat. When at least one of those two has some wiggle room, things start to get moving again. Although my work schedule is intense, working from home during the pandemic has eliminated my commute and given my back some of the time I needed to finish this project. This project has been by far the longest delayed, but if I'm being honest, it hasn't been for the most rational reasons of money or time. Jamisa embedded with Goldsboro during their Spring 2019 season. When we started this project with Strike Eagles, it was the first season in the club's existence. Unlike in other projects, I had no measuring stick to hold up and say "OK, Providence City has been making some noise for a couple years now, I see they're moving up through the ranks of the BSSL, and I know contextually what that means having started Non League America basically covering that league. Super Delegates was coming off a Second Division championship in the Maryland Majors, the same league as Open Cup darlings Christos FC, again, for someone who studies this realm of American soccer, you can make accurate assumptions based on that information. In the case of Goldsboro, I had no clue. I chose the club based off my personal experience living and working in that region back in 2005-2006. I lived in New Bern and Kinston each for a year, and worked primarily in Kinston and Goldsboro as an advertising sales rep for the urban radio station in the area. I spent all my time driving up and down Highway 70 and the people that I met out there, who took me in and treated me like family cemented a very strong affinity in my heart for the region. I was in awe of the pride that people in those communities had for their hometown, and the rivalries, and cultural nuances between the three were fascinating to me. There's a fantastic documentary out about the grassroots basketball culture in Kinston that has 1 of every 50 players who play for that high school make the NBA. It's the highest NBA hit rate in the country. Outside of your typical main high school gym and streetball, there are 5 separate independent basketball gyms in a city of 21,000 people. It seems like a region that has the cultural DNA to provide a similar pipeline for soccer if the game takes root there. Since I got involved in this soccer shit, I had been monitoring the leagues, hoping that someone would pop up in Eastern North Carolina, and when I saw that UPSL twitter club announcement pop up for Goldsboro, I was all over it.
It was that personal history and its overlap with the first and fourth lenses above that get me started. Once filming began it was the clubs losing record during our embed that kept the footage shelved for so long. I didn't know how to spin it. Every other doc that we had filmed to date had ultimately had a pretty successful outcome for the club involved. Even when Super Delegates FC lost in the second round of US Open Cup Qualifying, we filmed them winning in the first, which set up a nice away supporters bus trip for the second round and a festive atmosphere. There was none of that here. Goldsboro went 1 win, 1 draw, and 6 losses in the Spring season. I was just stuck for a long time. I didn't see a lot of appeal in the story of a losing team. Jamisa had embedded with the club for a month and I don't think she ever caught a win in 4 or 5 games. As I was talking with Jamisa, I was very encouraged with the human story that was unfolding with the club's long standing involvement with the kids and schools that predated the formation of the UPSL team, and even though I am passionate about social justice issues, ultimately, this is a soccer documentary and I was just stuck in a negative place about the soccer story. All we ever budgeted for the doc was to embed for that one month, and because this doc came right on the tail end of a year long bender of doc making, there was no backup budget. We were tapped out. Fall rolled around and a new season kicked off, and what do you know, Goldsboro Strike Eagles can't stop winning. I'm frantically trying to see if I can scrape up some money to send Jamisa back down there as it became clear they were headed for the playoffs, but I just couldn't justify it. I watched a stream of their Mid Atlantic Division Championship game vs. Soda City FC sitting at a bar on my phone. It was such a hard fought game, and Goldsboro would have had a chance to travel down to Florida for playoffs, but I left there thinking maybe I can get access to some of these streams from the playoff games and craft together a redemption story that way. Then the holidays came and went, then in January and February I was racking up the frequent flyer miles doing research for work right before the pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, I was a little overwhelmed and during the peak of the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests I just couldn't think about doing this. I could barely do my primary job, which I am blessed to still have through a pandemic. I was also depressed about the fact that we had originally hoped to screen the film in the movie theater in Goldsboro and promote it as a community event, and obviously the pandemic killed that idea. Eventually around Labor Day, with the threat of Goldsboro Strike Eagles returning to the field, I realized I had an obligation to wrap this thing up and get it out there. For the last month I've been tracking down those streams from the fall, getting all the stakeholders aligned and putting the finishing touches on the doc. I could not have done it without the tremendous patience of Coach Yacouba Ide of the Strike Eagles, Jamisa Johnson and her amazing work both behind the camera and in editing, and the finishing touches via the motion graphics by Rotimi Martins. A huge thank you to all involved.
The film is beautiful, how much time did your team spend filming?
Jamisa was in field for approximately 1 month. She took three trips to Goldsboro. It was a similar fielding schedule to both the Providence City and Super Delegates docs.
Race is an underlying aspect of this film. As a filmmaker, is it awkward to ask questions about this issue? Do you see it as an important subject for soccer fans to consider?
It's not awkward for me to talk about race. It is a focal point of my life. I realized at a very young age that the underlying cultural driver of just about everything that takes place in the public sphere of American life is related to race. I've spent my entire life attempting to cultivate greater understanding of interracial social and power dynamics. I am completely keyed in on race and its presence in situations at all times. I currently work for a Black owned company in my primary job here in Chicago and I previously worked for a Black owned company in my prior job in Atlanta. Soccer fans absolutely need to think about race. Soccer's initial popularity in America and the proliferation of prohibitively expensive pay to play youth soccer programs is directly related to White flight and White parents looking for a sport that they could dominate without having to play with Black kids. You don't have to like that fact, I don't, but you can't deny it. Soccer is the cheapest sport to play in the world. All you need is a ball. The long term success of soccer in the United States is directly related to its embracing or rejection by the African American community. I say African American specifically not Black because as we know Caribbean and African immigrant communities come from soccer first cultures. Perceptions are changing rapidly in the current generation. Not only were African Americans historically discouraged from playing soccer, there historically has not been a clear profit motive to go pro in this country. Even taking into account racial income disparities, for years professional soccer salaries in this country were below what one could reasonably expect in any variety of full time white or blue collar jobs with health insurance. MLS isn't doing much to change that situation. What does give me hope is the proliferation of European soccer on TV. Now kids can watch full stadiums of pro clubs in Europe and learn about the salaries of European pros that are more aligned with financial opportunities in the Big 4 professional domestic sports leagues.
How can people support NLA and what you're doing?
People can follow us on twitter @NonLeagueUSA that's our primary social media outlet. You can view all our documentaries on our Facebook page facebook.com/NonLeagueUSA, or on our YouTube channel just search Non League America. You can also follow us on IG @nonleagueamerica. You can also email us at nonleagueamerica@gmail.com. If you're interested in hiring us to make a documentary by all means we would love to hear from you. We are also interested in hearing from angel investors. We have a plan to scale and build something revolutionary for American soccer media.
What's next for NLA?
A new updated and modernized website at nonleagueamerica.com, with a new online store, and some new merchandise coming soon. We also continue to research potential new projects for a post pandemic reality. We are specifically interested in moving toward greater coverage of unsanctioned ethnic tournaments and clubs in the American soccer landscape.
And with that, here’s the film we’ve been discussing: