TVO’s latest original documentary The Pitch provides a snapshot of the uphill battle to increase the prominence of women’s sports in Canada.

In spring 2022, director and editor Michèle Hozer (Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould) reached out to her childhood friend Nathalie Cook — who had recently departed as VP of TSN and RDS — to ask her opinion of an idea for a sports documentary. After looking over the synopsis, Cook replied: “It’s okay — but what do you think about this?”

“This” was an ambitious idea that had been brought to Cook by former Team Canada soccer star Diana Matheson: the formation of the first-ever Canadian professional women’s soccer league. Having agreed to consult on Matheson’s campaign, it now occurred to Cook that a documentary project chronicling that journey could be a powerful tool for advancing the cause of women’s sports in Canada.

The result is The Pitch, a TVO original feature documentary that follows Matheson and her partners — including fellow superstar Christine Sinclair — over the nearly three-year odyssey that culminated in the successful launch of the Northern Super League (NSL) in spring 2025. Following a six-city impact-screening campaign across the country from September through November, the film is set to make its broadcast debut on TVO on Nov. 9.

Hozer is the director and producer of the film under her banner The Cutting Factory, with Bryn Hughes also serving as a producer and Cook as executive producer.

Financing and development

According to Hozer (pictured right), a self-professed Ted Lasso (circa season one) when it comes to soccer knowledge, when she embarked on the project she was surprised to learn that it was Matheson and her fellow players, rather than any official sporting organization, that was spearheading the campaign for a women’s league.

“That [became] the North Star of the project,” says Hozer. “Why is it on the backs of these former players to put together a league, when it should be the federation?”

The federation in question is Canada Soccer, the sport’s national governing body, whose sanction was crucial for Matheson’s NSL dream to become a reality. As Hozer learned, the organization’s general apathy when it came to the women’s game (as The Pitch candidly reveals) meant that any idea of finding a deep-pocketed sponsor for the documentary was not in the cards at the time, and necessitated that she start shooting on a purely self-funded basis.

Things changed in fall 2023, when TVO made a commitment to the project and provided development financing, triggering an equal contribution from the Canada Media Fund (CMF). Ontario Creates also came on board with development funds, creating a total pool of $35,000.

On the back of that, and following the recruitment of Hughes (The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal) to share producing duties with Hozer, the team started applying to assorted funding agencies in early 2024. Cook, meanwhile, was in talks with Canadian Tire, an avid supporter of women’s sports in Canada, as a potential corporate partner for the project.

TVO was confirmed as the commissioning broadcaster in spring 2024, with the license fee going towards production financing. Ontario Creates also chipped in production funds, along with the Rogers Documentary Fund and the CMF via its POV Program.

Canadian Tire contributed both production funding for the project as well as a distribution advance for the planned 2026 impact tour, while Cook’s old home of TSN/RDS chipped in with a license fee for second-window broadcast rights.

According to Hozer, the final budget came to $1.025 million across development and production.

Production and post-production

Initial filming took place in Toronto in December 2022, when Matheson and Sinclair appeared on CBC’s The National to formally announce the plans for what was at that time provisionally called Project 8. Hozer then proceeded to follow Matheson intermittently over the next several months as she campaigned for Canada Soccer to approve the league.

That brought the project right up against the headline-making controversy in early 2023 between the federation and the Canada women’s team over the issue of pay equity, which included a brief strike by the players and a threat of legal action from Canada Soccer. In the fallout from the bitter dispute, Canada Soccer president Nick Bontis stepped down in February, followed in April by general secretary Earl Cochrane.

“We went with Diana to New Brunswick [in May 2023] for the Canada Soccer annual members meeting, and I wasn’t exactly welcomed. Canada Soccer had enough going on [without having] a documentary crew around,” says Hozer. “And because we weren’t allowed to bring cameras in [to the meeting] it was very challenging to try and cover that event.”

Nevertheless, the 2023 meeting marked a milestone in Matheson’s quest as Canada Soccer officially approved the nascent NSL as a member league.

At that point the team was firmly locked in to what had always been projected as the endpoint of the film’s narrative — the kickoff of the NSL’s first match, at that point still nearly two years off. Hozer began to expand the scope of shooting through 2023 and 2024 to capture the process of building the league’s initial roster of six teams: the Halifax Tides, Montreal Roses, AFC Toronto, Ottawa Rapid, Calgary Wild and Vancouver Rise.

Hozer shot with cinematographer John Minh Tran whenever possible, hiring local crews when necessary. She also equipped Matheson’s wife, former Olympic speed skater Anastasia Bucsis, with a miniature camera and road mics to capture intimate, behind-the-scenes moments with the typically “game-faced” Matheson throughout the long odyssey to bring the league to life.

Hozer also shot footage of former Team Canada goalkeeper Erin McLeod  in Iceland in 2024. Then playing in the country’s domestic league, McLeod was being approached to join the Halifax Tides in the NSL, which she ultimately did in October of that year.

For Hozer, this was one of the key narrative strands of the film. “What I didn’t know is that if you want to be a Canadian woman soccer player, you have to leave your home and not come back,” she says. “Now, replace ‘athlete’ with woman doctor, lawyer, filmmaker — we would never accept those terms. And yet in the sports world, it’s for some reason accepted.

“So we knew that one of the stories we wanted to have was the player returning home, and Erin was the perfect person for that.”

Nearly two and a half years after Matheson and Sinclair announced the intention to launch the NSL, the league kicked off its first game at Vancouver’s BC Place on April 16, with the Vancouver Rise hosting the Calgary Wild. After filming that triumphant finale for the doc, Hozer and her team did two weeks of additional shoots at NSL games in Toronto, Halifax and Ottawa for a valedictory end-credits montage.

Hozer and her post team then camped out in the director’s home editing suite in Prince Edward County, Ont. to cut their footage. From the beginning of production, Hozer had held firm to her view that the story was best suited to a feature rather than series format, even as the latter possibility was occasionally floated by some of the project’s funding partners.

“To me, this is a universal story, sort of a David-and-Goliath story — it’s a story about equity, about women constantly having to claim the space that should be rightfully theirs,” says Hozer. “[And] I knew that, the minute [you make this story] into a series, it was just going to be a sports doc. And I don’t think that’s why Nathalie brought me in; she could have found other people to do a series.”

Editing took place on an extremely accelerated timeline, as Cook was adamant that the film had to debut ahead of the first NSL championship in November. “[The edit crew] all lived for four weeks in my farmhouse, [and] we were able to get a 70-minute cut by May 31,” Hozer says.

With that initial cut prepped, the team then had the next few weeks to incorporate the additional material from the other NSL games. The final 98-minute version of the film was locked by July 30.

Sales and marketing

The Pitch made its world premiere at Halifax’s Atlantic International Film Festival on Sept. 15, and proceeded to embark on a community impact tour to the six NSL-team home cities throughout the final leg of the league’s inaugural season. Hozer and Matheson were present for all the screenings, with Sinclair also joining for several dates.

As part of its financial commitment to the film came in the form of a distribution advance, Canadian Tire has served as presenting sponsor of the tour, with Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities as community partner. Toyota Canada and Coca-Cola also came on as sponsors in summer 2025 to help underwrite travel costs for the tour, while the non-profit Canadian Women & Sport signed on as impact partner.

While there was no financial commitment to the tour from the NSL, Hozer and Cook say the screenings were very much planned in collaboration with the league as a means of raising community awareness and support for the teams.

The Toronto stop of the tour will take place on Nov. 12, three days after The Pitch‘s TVO premiere and three out from the first-ever NSL championship game at the city’s BMO Field. The second-window release on TSN and RDS will take place in spring 2026, ahead of the launch of the NSL’s second season.

Despite the “universal” quality that Hozer identifies in the film’s narrative — not to mention the ascendant global profile of women’s professional sports — she acknowledges that The Pitch is also “a very Canadian story,” which is one reason why they have yet to explore potential international sales. There is currently no distributor attached to the film, though Hozer says she is preparing a 60-minute cut for potential export.

For Cook’s part, while she is bullish about the rise of women’s pro sports in Canada with the arrival of the NSL and the Professional Women’s Hockey League — as well as the Toronto Tempo, which is slated to begin play in the WNBA in 2026 — she adds that “we’re still very much at the starting line” in this country.

“When you think that five years ago there was literally nothing in Canada, and now we’re about to have two leagues and a professional team here — it’s incredible,” she says. “But it needs to be nurtured, and it needs to be sustainable.”

Images courtesy of TVO