This interview features filmmaker Abby Cannon discussing Fire Starters, her film about the launch of the Women’s Professional Baseball League, told through the journeys of three athletes working to earn a roster spot. What starts as a look into Cannon’s storytelling process leads to something larger: the arrival of a new professional women’s baseball league in the U.S., shaped by the women who never had an opportunity to play professionally. Fire Starters follows Stephanie Everett, Keira Izumi, and Valerie Perez, using their individual journeys to show what this first season means not only to the players themselves, but to the future of girls’ and women’s baseball.
The Women’s Pro Baseball League will play its inaugural game on August 1, 2026. Rockford, Illinois, will play host to the entire 30-game season running through mid-September. Games will be played at Robin Roberts Stadium.
9inningnomad: For people just getting introduced to you, what pulled you into documentaries in the first place?
Abby Cannon: I grew up playing sports my whole life. From the time I could walk, I was playing sports, so that’s always been a huge part of my life. It kind of took a couple of injuries to make me think about my life in different ways. But I’ve always loved storytelling. I’ve always loved writing; really, it’s what I started to love when I was a kid. I would come home and tell my parents these wild stories, and then it would come out later that they weren’t true at all. I just made them up. I was always kind of a storyteller, and I loved to do that.
In my junior year of high school, I had a pretty bad knee injury. I was out for a year, and I started to think about journalism. I joined my high school newspaper and started writing articles. My dad was a journalism professor at Indiana University for a long time, and my mom’s an English teacher, so they were able to help me out in that way. Then, somewhere along the way, I took a film class and realized I could combine this really cool thing that I loved with journalism. I was always drawn to literary journalism. My favorite writer is Susan Orlean, and I’ve always wanted to combine that world with documentary filmmaking.
And then somewhere recently, I started combining that with my love of sports, and more specifically, my love of women’s sports. The last film I finished, In Her Court, and this one are both centered around uplifting women in sports.
The moment storytelling became real
9: Was there a specific moment when storytelling stopped feeling like an interest and started feeling like something bigger?
Abby: That junior year of high school. I had just torn my ACL, MCL, and meniscus. I completely blew out my knee playing soccer, and soccer was kind of what I thought I was going to do for as long as I could. It was all my mind was on, really. I was out for a year. I needed things to do. I started taking storytelling more seriously.
Right around that time, it was 2018, and that was when the March for Our Lives protests around gun violence were happening after the Parkland shooting. I got really involved with that movement at my school, and that was right when I was writing articles for the newspaper. I don’t really know how these pieces fell into place, but we organized around 50 students from our school alone to travel to Washington, D.C., and participate in the march.
Then I somehow got the gig with my city newspaper, the Bloomington Herald Times. I was 16 years old, and I was covering that story for the paper. I had no idea what I was doing. I was completely fumbling my way through it. I had a lot of help from my dad, but it was really a fake-it-till-you-make-it type of situation. The very next day after the march, somebody pulled it up on their phone, and it was on the front page of the paper. That was the coolest thing. My parents met me when we got off the bus back in Indiana, and they had the newspaper with them.
I loved the feeling of illuminating something that I was passionate about, interviewing people, and asking questions. That was the first storytelling moment that felt bigger than myself.
9: You’ve found a clear lane in women’s sports storytelling. Why does that space matter so much to you?
Abby: I’ve always played sports. I played soccer, basketball, and track growing up. Those were my sports. But baseball was always my favorite sport to watch. You can ask my family, you can ask anybody, it was always my favorite sport to watch. Which is something you’ll never hear people say.
So I grew up loving baseball, and I’ve also been a girl and a woman in sports my whole life. I think I’ve kind of figured out that uplifting women in sports is what I’m really passionate about.
How Fire Starters came together
9: How did Fire Starters come about?
Abby: This is my master’s thesis film, which is really, I think it’s bigger than that, but that’s where it came from. I was looking for a thesis topic, and I was kind of riding this women’s sports storytelling high coming off my last film.
I saw that they were having tryouts in Washington, D.C. for the Women’s Pro Baseball League, and I saw that happening before I even had the film idea. At first, I wanted to focus on one woman who maybe wasn’t as well known, where this new exciting thing was also kind of derailing her life a little bit. I wanted the focus to be on one person going through that experience. But as I started talking to more and more players, I realized this was so much bigger. There are 80 years of women’s baseball history that have been in the shadows since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. I realized this isn’t just about the present players. It’s also about honoring the years of women who couldn’t play professional baseball in the U.S., and it’s about future little girls who are going to be able to see themselves in the sport in a way they haven’t before. We’re hoping they’ll light this fire and it’ll catch and spread to future generations. That’s kind of where the title came from.
9: Who’s on the crew?
Abby: We have our producer, Mira Celik. Our DP (Director of Photography) is Giovana Roskosz Reis. One of our camera operators and cinematographers, who’s been coming to a couple of the shoots, is Anastasiia Polyakov, along with a ton of help from others.
9: Did you feel urgency to make this documentary in the league’s first year?
Abby: Yeah. As things started to unfold, I realized there’s so much unknown in this whole experience leading up to the league. I really wanted to capture the unknown as opposed to following it after it’s already had a couple of seasons.
There are inherently way more stakes in it if you don’t know how it’s going to go. Knock on wood, we think it’s going to be amazing, but you can’t guarantee it. As a filmmaker, it’s way more pressing that it’s the first season, that we’ve never had anything like it, and that we’re not really sure how it’s going to go. People aren’t really watching women’s baseball yet. People don’t really know what’s going on. I think it’s going to be big. I think it’s going to be great. But as a storyteller, it’s cool to capture those nerves that come with what if it doesn’t work out. Maybe I’m putting all of this on the line if I’m a player, maybe I’m putting my life on the line for something that doesn’t work out.
One of the women in my film is a sophomore in college. She’s just getting her academic life and career going, and suddenly she’s a professional athlete. You don’t see that ever in pro sports. That uncertainty and those stakes are what make it so compelling.
Trust, access, and ethical storytelling
9: A documentary filmmaker has to observe without interference. How do you approach that balance? Is there a struggle with it at all?
Abby: I wouldn’t say I struggle with it. I think you have to build relationships with the participants in your film before you start filming because you want to gain their trust, make sure everybody’s comfortable, make sure everything is ethical, and make sure everybody’s on the same page. I build those relationships, and I’m very transparent about what’s going to happen when we get there with the cameras. I tell them exactly what I need from them, and usually that’s technical or scheduling things. We’re going to put a mic on you, we’re going to be here with the cameras, but just go about what you’re doing.
Once I build that rapport with the people I’m working with, it kind of just flows. If you have the right subjects, the right people, and the right story, and you know what that story is, it’s really easy to just turn on the camera and let it unfold. I also think I relate to them on a lot of levels, especially when telling stories about women in sports. I’ve never been a professional athlete, but I have been a girl and a woman in sports. I empathize with them on another level, and I think that makes it easier for me to tell their authentic story.
9: What’s one thing you’ve learned about getting people comfortable enough to really open up?
Abby: I think talking to them outside of filming, not so much in an interview way, and kind of getting to know them before is really important. Some people call this a pre-interview. I like to think of it more as a series of conversations where I get to know this person and their story before I start interviewing them on camera.
9: Any deeper tips for younger filmmakers?
Abby: If I were giving advice to storytellers, I’d say: if you’ve got a subject you don’t really know, and you have to start filming soon, have some phone calls with that person where you say, “None of this is recorded. None of this is going to be in the film. I just want to get to know you so that I can tell your story with as much authenticity as I can.”
Also, when you’re telling the stories of women and minorities, it’s so important to help them see that you care about them as a person and not just as a documentary subject. So much of the time, people are exploited in environments like that, and people are asking gotcha questions. That’s not what I’m about at all. I want to know what their story is before I start filming so that I can tell that story.
Like, my job as a filmmaker and storyteller is to guide that and represent it in a way that’s going to send all the messages that we want to send and hit all of the emotional points in the film and get other people to care. If you have the right people telling the story and you just let them tell it, people are going to care. My job is to guide that and organize it in a way that impacts people at the right moments. That’s the art of it, that’s the fun of it. But the storytelling of it is just getting to know this person, building their trust, caring about them as a human being, and then letting them tell their story themselves.
Knowing when to keep rolling
9: How do you know when to keep the camera rolling and when to pull back?
Abby: I think a lot of it is instinct. Some of those emotional moments are really important for the film. I think people need to see raw emotion. On the other side of things, part of building that trust is respecting what they want the story to be and how they want to be represented.
So I always tell them, “You can tell me to back off. This is me telling your story.” But all of this raw emotion is important, and usually, people are on board with that when you are transparent in that way.
There was a moment during the Women’s Pro Baseball League draft. We were filming with one of the women in the film at a watch party in New York, and we were getting pretty late into the draft, and she still hadn’t been drafted. It was getting really tense. You could feel it in the room, and you could see the dread on her face.
But we kept rolling. That was a decision I made because I knew that the low of it starting to hit her, “I don’t think this is going to happen…” followed by the high of her name being called was going to be the peak of that moment. And it was. That was Stephanie Everett. It was the most beautiful moment.
Would I have kept filming if she wasn’t drafted? Probably. Unless she walked away. I wouldn’t follow her. I’m not a reality TV producer. I would just let her leave. But I was very transparent with her that if she needed to go, she could just go. It can all be a fine line.
Observations
9: Have you already seen younger girls reacting to all of this in real time?
Abby: Yeah. We were at a spring training event, kind of at the back of the room with our cameras, and there was this little girl sitting at our table with us. Her name was Remy. She was wearing her baseball jersey and her hat, and she was just the sweetest girl in the world.
We talked to her about what we were doing, and she was really excited just to see the players. I don’t know if she fully understood what we were doing, but she was really excited to talk about what was happening. And I do see how little girls walk by and just light up when they see these players. It is such a special thing to see.
I will say, it is definitely healing the little girl inside of me as an athlete.” -Abby Cannon
9: What’s one moment from making this film that makes you laugh?
Abby: The two women filming with me on the crew in Fort Myers for the WPBL spring training event knew nothing about baseball. The night before the exhibition game, one of them said, “I need you to explain baseball to me. I need you to teach me what I need to know to be able to film this sport.”
I actually did the same thing with someone else on my last film with basketball. She really just needed to know the rules so she knew where to stand, what was going to happen, what this person’s objective is when they’re throwing this ball, and what our player might do when she gets it. So I took the hotel notepad and drew out a baseball field. I drew the diamond, put the bases on there, and marked where our players would be on defense and who to pay attention to. There’s a lot to baseball. You can’t really learn it in one night, so I just stuck to the basics.
9: Where are you in the process right now?
Abby: We filmed the draft. We filmed the spring training event. Now we’re going to film with Keira Izumi in Los Angeles — going to class, interviews, and some practices. She founded the first women’s club baseball team at USC, so we’ll film with her there.
Then we’ve got to travel to Georgia to film with Val Perez, and then we’ll film again with Steph in New York. The plan is those three shoots, and then one more shoot on the day of the league’s launch in Rockford, Illinois. We’re filming, and I’m editing kind of as I go, a little bit. Right now, we’re also focusing a lot on crowdfunding and getting this thing funded. That’s where we’re at.
Quick hits
9: Favorite non-documentary movie?
Abby: Napoleon Dynamite. I wish I could think of something more film-sophisticated because I’m literally a filmmaker, but that was the first thing that came to mind. I love that movie so much.
9: A documentary you’d recommend?
Abby: The last documentary I saw was Team Maryland. It’s about a 12-year-old girl boxer. That was a really cool film. I’d 10 out of 10 recommend it.
9: Favorite artist?
Abby: Harry Styles. I’m not even embarrassed by it.
9: Favorite woman athlete growing up?
Abby: Abby Wambach. I was a total freak for Abby Wambach. I grew up playing soccer, and she was exactly the player I wanted to be.
9: Do you have a release date yet?
Abby: We don’t have a release date. I think the film will be finished at the end of the summer, and then it’ll make a film festival run. So you might have to wait a year after that.
9: Years from now, what do you hope people see when they watch Fire Starters?
Abby: I hope that this is kind of a time capsule — something they can look back on and remember how exciting this moment was. I hope that in 10 years, we see girls’ baseball taking off around the country. I hope we see college women’s baseball start to be a thing. I hope that this just lights that fire and for it to spread.
I hope they can look back and see a film like this and go, “Oh wow, we’ve really come a long way since those first moments leading up to the first season.” I hope it’s a booming success, and I think it’s a really cool opportunity for me as a storyteller to be able to capture that moment in time.