Ruby Naylor's crowning achievement for her final journalism class at New York University just might land her first professional job in the media world.
Naylor, a former defender who played for STA in EDP Soccer leagues, produced a short documentary about Nottingham Forest that informs and entertains viewers about the English Premier League side.
Naylor did not play the beautiful game at NYU because she realized she would not have time to pursue her favorite sport and academics. But that didn't deter the 22-year-old from continuing to translate her passion of the sport from the field to video.
"It’s great to see former players continuing in the sport," former STA head coach John Tait said. "We all know most youth soccer players who play in leagues like EDP go to college and then need to find a job NOT as a professional player. It's heartening that a former youth soccer player wants to stay connected to the game the way Ruby is."
Based in Morris County, New Jersey, STA has produced countless talented players and teams that have won dozens of championships on local, regional, and national levels. Naylor was one of those players that helped her girls’ teams to glory.
When Naylor was invited to a senior honors thesis program at the school, she was tasked to make a documentary.
"They gave us pretty much free reign on whatever you wanted to do," she said.
The summer prior, Naylor produced a four-minute documentary about the 2023 Women's World Cup.
"I had a lot of fun making that and interviewing people for that," she said. "I figured I would continue on the theme and do something I enjoy, like soccer for my big one."
She selected something very close to her heart — the passionate fans of Nottingham Forest — with a tradition that has been handed down from generation to generation. Naylor should know, her father, James, is a Forest supporter.
"I feel that in the states, the connection with an English Premier League football club gets lost a lot, because oftentimes people will pick a team based on a player," Naylor said. "I feel that Americans sometimes don't understand how deeply rooted [a team] like a Liverpool is in the whole city. I wanted to get across how much this means to people and try and explain the passion behind it. The Nottingham football team has my family's support since that's where they live. I decided to do Forest because my family is only about a 15-minute drive from the stadium."
Just a little background about Forest. The club won consecutive European Cups in 1978-79 and 1979-80, but then fell on hard times, competing in the English Championship (second pro tier) for 23 years before earning promotion to the EPL in 2022.
Entitled "Nottingham Forest are Magic," the documentary is 19 minutes long, but it took Naylor about eight months to complete.
Naylor was a one-woman show on the crew, writing it, performing interviews, traveling to England, and editing it (that took 2 1/2 months). It certainly was an education and a half in how to produce a documentary.
"It is obviously a lot of work, but was a lot more rewarding than I can say," she said. "This was, entirely me. ... When I think about one of the top 20 clubs in England, one of the biggest clubs in Europe, two European Championships, it's really surreal that I got an experience like that all on my own."
Perhaps the biggest hurdle was to get Forest's permission to talk to players and attend games as a journalist. She received permission from the team.
"The access that I got to a Premier League club is so rare, especially as a student, with no BBC or ITV or NBC [background] or anything like that behind me. To get the access I did was kind of insane," Naylor said.
Filming took the entire month of January. Naylor said that she filmed just about every day, taking in four matches, one pitch-side, and the others as a fan.
Remarkably, the video filming was done on Naylor's cellphone.
The general public doesn't necessarily know what goes behind the scenes of producing a documentary, or any video or film, for that matter. Difficult decisions are made in what to keep and what to cut.
"That was definitely the most daunting part of it, because it's all the little things that maybe somebody who doesn't edit wouldn't, but making sure the audio doesn't cut out quickly and stuff like that," she said. "I played around with the audio mixing for a really long time. I had to cut clips from the internet. Because I'm publishing it, I had to get permission from each clip that I used from whoever recorded it."
When Naylor finished her project, she faced another challenge - the public's reaction to all her hard work and effort.
She said that it was "a massive weight off my chest," upon completion.
"But once I was actually done, it was still really nerve-wracking, until I actually published because I was wondering if people would like it," Naylor added. "I didn't want to mess it up in terms of people being like, 'Oh, this is not how we feel.' Or, 'You captured it incorrectly.'
"Once I published it, I wouldn't look at any of the comments for two hours. I thought, if everybody hates it, and I just spent all this time on it, that's going to be horrendous. But then the feedback was wonderful, which was really nice. It was just a massive relief.
"It also signified the end of my university experience. I was done with school. I was becoming a real adult. So it was a really weird feeling, a weird realization. It took so long, like writing a book. It's something that you spend a lot of time on, and obviously you care a lot about. So, it felt really exciting, but also kind of sad to be done."
Naylor was born in California and lived in the United Kingdom for a short period. Naylor has dual citizenship with the USA and England.
Her family eventually moved to Sparta, N.J. and Naylor started playing soccer at the age of three. She performed with a team named the Dynamo before joining STA in seventh grade and playing through her junior year of high school. Naylor also played four years in high school. Naylor was an outside back.
She certainly enjoyed her EDP experience, not necessarily because STA was a successful side, but because the league was challenging.
"We definitely had our fair share of beat downs, and definitely beat some other teams by a lot," she said. "So, it was a lot of fun. We were never people that put too much pressure on their sisters. If we played poorly, it was not great, but if we played well and still lost, we were still always in good spirits. Nobody ever blamed anybody, which was really good. We had such a close-knit team that nobody was at fault for a goal. Nobody ever was yelling at somebody because they didn't do it. It was non-toxic."
Given that Naylor's father was a big Nottingham Forest supporter and football fan in England, it should not be surprising that she has a passion for the game.
"Every week, it made my dad one of my best friends,” she said. “Every weekend we have a game two hours away or a tournament where we had to stay overnight. When I played for STA, the practices were about 45 minutes away from where I live, so we were doing that three to five times a week. When I wasn't playing soccer, my dad and I would watch Premier League games, waking up at 7:30 and watching them until around noon.
"I just fell in love with it, and then realized how much it means to so many people around the world, because growing up in the states, I don't think people liked it as much. American football and basketball are the biggest ones."
And of course, there's a passion for Nottingham Forest.
"I would say I'm a pretty massive fan," she said. "I definitely can't claim to be as massive of a fan as a lot of people, because they've had season tickets since the age of four, but I still love it, probably as much as anybody possibly could from a separate continent."
Naylor is playing soccer again, in a 7 v 7 coed league in upper westside of Manhattan, every Wednesday, "which is a lot of fun outside," she said.
And oh yeah, before we forget, Naylor received an A for the project and graduated from NYU with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics, broadcast journalism and Spanish, in May.
At last look, the video is at 16,000 views and counting.
Naylor hopes that her Nottingham Forest documentary will lead to a job in the industry.
"I'd love for it to get me either some sort of on-camera or production job," she said. "That's definitely the goal."
Ruby Naylor certainly has gotten off to a very good start.