Camp recap · Central Maryland ASL Camp
“Every means Every.”
An FCA project · produced as Regional Marketing Director, FCA Mid-Atlantic
The problem
In 2022, FCA built its whole year around one word: Every. If the mission is reaching every coach and every athlete, then every has to mean every, including the communities the sports world tends to leave out. Out of that, our region started building all-ability camps, and one of them was an ASL camp in Central Maryland, made strictly for Deaf and hard-of-hearing athletes so they could have a camp that was fully their own.
The film's job was simple and important: show what the camp was, how it happened, and why serving this community matters, so more athletes would come back the next year.
The approach
This was a brand-new environment for me, and the one real challenge was never the story, it was how to get it. Deaf athletes have a story to tell exactly like hearing athletes do. So we ran our interviews through an ASL interpreter and treated it like any other story worth telling well. Two choices set this film apart. We made a signed version, produced with the story signed on screen, so Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers could watch it in their own language instead of only reading subtitles. And we took the music out, on purpose, because a score would have papered over the thing we most wanted people to feel: what this camp is actually like. The quiet is the point.
The result
It premiered on the Maryland FCA YouTube page and went to the staff who ran the camp. I will be honest about this one: it did its job quietly, no complaints, no fanfare.
A clean, accessible record of a camp most of the sports world does not know exists, made so the people it was about could actually watch it.Braden · on the ASL camp film
What we delivered
The camp recap film, plus a fully signed on-screen version for Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.
Serving a community most people overlook?
Every film needs somewhere to land. The Storytelling System is the part that makes sure it does.