Former South Whidbey resident Ruth Gregory, at left, and Salt Lake City native Jessica Mathews recently completed a documentary that follows a group of international women’s ski jumpers on their quest for equality in their sport.

Ruth Gregory first dabbled in the power of documentary filmmaking while completing a project for history class when she was a student at South Whidbey High. She says she was really into studying the 1960s and the student movement of the time. So, she and her father traveled to Ohio to film a documentary about the Kent State University shootings.

“I like to think everything I do is overly ambitious in some shape or form,” she said. “But at the same time it just seems natural to want to do a project well.”

Her film placed seventh in the national history day competition that year.

Gregory, 26, is the daughter of Dan and Marilyn Gregory of Langley. She is a 1997 graduate of South Whidbey High School. While on South Whidbey she was a soccer player who competed on the high school and club fields.

“It was a big part of my identity. It was where I could be un-girly and where I could get out my frustrations,” Gregory said.

Jessica Mathews, 26 — editor for “Jump Like a Girl” and Gregory’s filmmaking partner — is a native of Salt Lake City, Utah.

She and Gregory met while attending the master’s film program at Ohio University. For her senior thesis Gregory knew she wanted to produce a documentary with a sports focus, and more specifically one that explored women’s roles in sports.

“There are so many movies where men in sports are portrayed as being glamorous, almost godlike,” Gregory said. “For women in sports it’s completely different.”

Gregory knows. She and her teammates were the first girls to play soccer for South Whidbey High School. They had to battle the school for permission to use Waterman Field for games, Gregory said.

In Gregory’s director’s statement she writes: “Friday nights were reserved for the guys as they dueled with rival high schools under the stadium lights and adoring eyes of the community. The girls’ soccer team, whose season ran concurrent with football, was regulated to the off-campus recreation field, and we would play our games at 4 p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday in front of a handful of supportive friends and family.”

Gregory says the team wasn’t allowed to play on school grounds until three years after the team’s first match.

“‘Jump Like a Girl’ represents my attempt to make a film that articulates what it is like to be a female athlete; the passion that you feel for your craft and the anguish you experience as you are consistently not accepted as an athlete.”

She partnered with Mathews to produce a film based on women ski jumpers after learning that at the 2002 Winter Olympics women ski jumpers were only allowed to warm up the hill for the men. They couldn’t compete.

Gregory and Mathews began background research in March 2002.

“It was hard to find, and the only film we could find about women’s ski jumping was an obscure documentary shot in the 1970s,” Mathews said.

They researched ski jumping and top female ski jumpers in America and found Lindsey Van and Jessica Jerome.

They met Jerome and Van when the girls were 15 and 17. Filming was done in one- to three-week durations until the final days of filming in July 2004. Mathews finished editing the film two weeks ago. They hope to premiere the documentary at the Clyde Theater some time in mid-September.

Mathews sees documentaries as an important communication form in a current culture that embraces movies and television.

“Through sound and photography you’re able to capture a vision of reality to show to people,” Mathews said. “In documentaries you create a time and space for someone to focus on.”

Along with working to find post-graduate school employment, the duo is looking for television distribution of “Jump Like a Girl.”

“I watched these girls and said, ‘Wow, I wish I jumped like a girl,’” Gregory said. “I want other people to do the same.”