It was homecoming week at Tomales High School and, for the first time in a long while, a buzz filled the halls about Friday night’s big game.
The Braves may not boast the legacy of a powerhouse football program, a gleaming trophy case overflowing with championship hardware or a roster stacked with Division I prospects. But the team is known for its grit, and it has captured the attention of the National Football League.
Last week, a crew from NFL Films, the league’s production arm, arrived in Tomales to document the Braves, from the school corridors to the practice field, from the quiet moments of home life to the charged energy of homecoming.
Under the glow of the Friday night lights, the Braves took on the Elsie Allen Lobos, a team from a large public high school in Santa Rosa. As the players clashed on the field, the NFL cameras rolled. Elsie Allen, with a student body of over 1,000 compared to Tomales High’s 143, brought an imposing cheer squad and a full marching band. Their gold and silver capes gleamed under the stadium’s bright beams, plumes pointed straight toward the sky.
But Tomales showed up, too. In the overflowing stand and packed sidelines, students, alumni and fans blew plastic horns and spun rattling ratchets. Mothers wrapped in blankets wrung their hands as four cheerleaders waved red and black pom-poms, chanting a syncopated “Go… Braves!” It was a David-versus-Goliath showdown, but sometimes reality defies the fable: not every giant falls to an underdog’s slingshot. The Braves were trounced, 66-32.
Even as defeat looked certain, the hometown crowd stayed lively, cheering for each small victory—every first down, each defensive stop—as if the scoreboard was incidental. And maybe it was. Maybe the crowd had let go of tired notions of what of high school football should be in favor of a simple love of school, community and showing up, win or lose.
“We didn’t come here to capture a team winning at homecoming,” said Margaret Morris, the project’s producer. “It was about something much bigger—the story that unfolds off the field, the lives of these players, and what this community is all about. Sure, a win on homecoming night would have made for a neat, victorious ending, but that’s not the way life works.”
Ms. Morris has been with NFL Films for 27 years, creating documentaries and television shows that often focus on the league’s biggest stars. But this project, she says, is among the most gratifying she’s worked on.
The Braves compete in an eight-player league, a style of football designed for smaller schools that may not have the numbers for a full 11-player team. The format is faster paced, with higher scoring, and the field itself is smaller. This year’s roster boasts 23 players, but in previous seasons, the team has fielded as few as nine.
Filming a football game is one of the most complex technical and logistical challenges in entertainment, and Tomales High’s homecoming was no exception. The crew had three cameras—a top camera capturing the wide-angle action, a sideline camera following the ball and catching close-up moments, and a third cameraman equipped with a handheld camera for dynamic action shots and a drone. A sound operator recorded the crashing of helmets, the crunch of a tackle, teammates shouting from the sidelines and the roaring approval of the crowd. The Braves’ head coach Tim Daugherty, assistant coach Fred Schultz and co-captains Carlos Lara and Stran Stevens wore mics.
The idea for the project began with Mr. Schultz, who struck up a friendship with Mark Allan, a longtime NFL director and producer, while working at the Point Reyes Station post office. Mr. Schultz, now in his second season with the Braves, brings two decades of coaching experience with him, and he sees echoes of his own upbring in Flint, Mich. in his athletes. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” he said, quoting Mark Twain.
Mr. Allan, who lives in Inverness Park, was intrigued by the idea and pitched it to his wife and collaborator, Susan Giacomini Allan. Ms. Allan was raised on a dairy in Ferndale, a small town in Humboldt County, and taught some of the Tomales players how to knit during 4-H classes. She immediately saw the story’s potential. A year and change later, Ms. Morris and her crew were on a plane from NFL Films’ headquarters in Mount Laurel, N.J., heading to West Marin.
When they arrived, the Allans welcomed them with a moveable feast—mead from Heidrun, sauerkraut from Wild West Ferments, Bivalve Diary cheese, steaks from Semple Creek Ranch, Straus butter, Double 8 gelato, vegetables from Little Wing and Star Route Farms, bread from Brickmaiden and cakes from Bovine Bakery.
“There are so many interconnected pieces to this story—our housing, our schools, our economy,” Ms. Allan said. “But it’s really an ode to farming here in West Marin.”
From the makeshift control room in a two-story, barn-red tower overlooking the field, she watched as her husband operated the camera. “These kids played really hard,” Mr. Allan reflected after the loss. “For someone who’s filmed as much football as I have, you can tell when a team is giving it everything. And they did.”
The school’s athletic director, Mike Fritsche, sees football as more than just a game. For him, it’s a way to provide students with a more well-rounded education, build school spirt and mend fences with the community.
Manning a concession stand featuring $3 tacos piled high with carnitas and carne asada, cilantro, red onion and a squeeze of lime was Nomar Isais, a 26-year-old alumnus turned shop teacher at Tomales. He was part of the school’s first-ever eight-man football team, which had just nine players.
“We had eight guys, and I was the ninth,” he recalled with a laugh. “I was the bench guy, but it still was a lot of fun.”
Now in his first year teaching at his alma mater, Mr. Isais has many of the players in his welding class. Raised on the Kehoe Dairy on Point Reyes, Mr. Isais grew up watching his father, a Jalisco native, milk cows for 22 years. “There’s a sense of pride of place,” he said. “There’s a tradition that comes with this sport here.”
Mr. Isais described how his friendships forged on the field were rooted in a shared connection with ranching. “The ranching families and us, we all grew up together and we don’t see a difference in each other,” he said. “We are all friends, and you don’t find the socioeconomic divisions here that you might elsewhere—it’s all just friendship.”
For Carlos Lara, the Braves’ standout running back, football levels the playing field. “Anyone can do it,” he said. “As Coach Schultz says, it’s the great equalizer. You can be a small guy with a big heart and still play football. That’s all you need.”
Still, quicksilver reflexes and nerves of steel can’t hurt.
Mr. Lara, who lives in Valley Ford, joined the team as a freshman. Now a senior, he admits that he used to skip practice. But over the years, he’s become a leader on and off the field, driven by a fierce desire to make his family proud. His mother, originally from Guadalajara, works as a cook at the Marshall Store, and her cooking—quesabirria, refried beans—makes his eyes light up.
The night before game day, she made him a protein-packed meal of four eggs and tri-tip beef jerky that she smoked. He proudly pointed out the spot on the bleachers where she always sits.
On the gridiron on Friday night, after scoring the game’s first touchdown, Mr. Lara suffered a concussion—one of the risks involved when teenage boys run into each other headfirst. Unwilling to end his final home game on the sidelines, he kept playing until coaches noticed something amiss and pulled him for the second half.
The 30-minute episode on the Braves, part of the series “NFL Films Presents,” will focus less on the homecoming game itself and more on the community and lives that surround it. It opens at dawn on the multi-generational Marshall ranch of 17-year-old Mr. Stevens, the team’s co-captain. The crew captured him performing his morning chores, loading hay onto an A.T.V. and driving up a hill to feed a herd of bulls and cows. It was a routine morning for Mr. Stevens, who’s been working on his family’s ranch since the summer after his sophomore year.
First cattle, then calculus.
“Even though this school is small, its culture is big,” he said during Monday’s practice. “It’s that old-school smashmouth football. You just give everything you’ve got. True grit.”
In the ranching community, toughness is essential, Mr. Stevens explained. That value carries onto the football field, where nearly half the players come from ranching families that are accustomed to hard work and discipline.
This year, Tomales High hired Mr. Daugherty, an Alabama native and active-duty Coast Guard chief petty officer with coaching experience in places like Kodiak, Alaska. Mr. Daugherty has brought a steady hand to the program and, as a military man, a belief in the power of regimented schedules. The NFL crew visited him at his Coast Guard base east of Tomales, where they filmed him teaching a class on communications equipment.
“I hold them accountable, not just on the field but off it, too,” he told the Light on Monday, dressed in a Braves-emblazoned sweatsuit and baseball cap.
Mr. Schultz, the offensive line coach, pushes his athletes to realize their potential. Together, the coaches are building a team grounded not only in speed and skill but the belief in each players’ capacity for growth, the power of hard work and future they’re building together.
“For the coaches, it’s not just about football,” Mr. Lara said. “They genuinely care about us. It’s not just about improving your skills; it’s about becoming a better man.”
When the final whistle blew on Friday, the Braves gathered in a tight huddle on the field. Kneeling on the cool grass, their warm breath rose into the night air, forming a faint halo around them. Tears glistened in the low light, captured by two cameramen spinning around them, the boom operator’s pole suspended just out of frame.
“It’s not as good as it seems, and it’s not as bad as it seems,” Mr. Schultz told his team. “The truth lies somewhere in between, and in that truth is wisdom. So, all we can do is correct what we didn’t do well, and build on what we did right.”