Author: Katelyn Best

Katelyn Best writes about the Thorns and the NWSL, among other things. She is the reigning taco champion of the North American women’s soccer circuit.

Categories
Soccer Thorns

The House that Clive Built

Photo courtesy of the Portland Timbers

It is December of 2002. The University of Portland women’s soccer team is in Austin, Texas, about to play Santa Clara for the NCAA championship. The Oregonian calls the team “more blue collar than showtime”; they’re known for their gritty defense, which has shut out every opponent so far, and their star striker, a sophomore out of Burnaby, British Columbia named Christine Sinclair, who has notched seven goals so far in the playoffs. They are a tight-knit group, punching well above their weight for a school of just over 3,000 students.

They have a rallying cry: win it for Clive. Their beloved coach, the 50-year-old Clive Charles, told the team he had cancer last spring. He’s getting treatment, but it’s a losing battle. In his thirteen seasons coaching the women, he’s come close to a championship several times, but never won, and his team knows this might be his last shot.

Here in Portland, a thousand or so students pile into the Chiles Center to watch the game on the big screen. UP students mingle with alumni and families; in one section, a pack of rowdy kids wearing only face paint and “kilts” (really a few yards of tartan fabric wrapped haphazardly around the waist) who call themselves the Villa Drum Squad pound drums and chant.

This is where women’s soccer as it exists in Portland today started to take shape. The scale is small, but you can catch a glimpse here of what Providence Park will look like 15 years in the future, just before a Thorns game kicks off—the drums, the tifos, the buzz in the air. At a school with no football team, in a city deeply unaccustomed to winning championships, Christine Sinclair is the biggest show in town.

This is the house that Clive built—without it, the Thorns wouldn’t be what they are—and in building it, he touched countless lives. Here’s how he did it, from the perspectives of three of those people.

1. Ganty

It is 1978, the Timbers’ fourth year in existence. Clive has just arrived in Portland. Soccer is still a novelty in the states, but the NASL is growing, with aging stars like Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, and George Best drawing attention. Attendance for the Timbers has been respectable, with averages between 13,000 and 20,000 in their first three seasons.

The club bought Clive from Cardiff City, where he had captained the team to promotion to the second tier. Brian Gant, a midfielder for the Timbers from 1977–1982—who is also, not coincidentally, Christine Sinclair’s uncle—describes Clive as “ahead of his time” as a player, an attacking outside back before attacking outside backs were really a thing.

“The back four back in those days, it was all about take no prisoners,” Gant says. “You had these all these big, strong physical guys, but he was a flair player who had a great left foot, incredible. He used to always tell guys, ‘hey, guys, I could play a tune on the piano with this left foot.’”

Photo courtesy of the Portland Timbers

But it’s Clive the teammate, not Clive the player, who would really make an impression. That spring, when he walked into the Timbers’ dressing room at Catlin Gabel for the first time, the gravity shifted in his direction. “I thought, wow, he’s a friendly sort of guy, he is,” remembers Gant. “He was just the most easygoing, funny, just charismatic guy you’d ever meet.”

By that time, a substantial contingent of Timbers players were calling Portland home year-round. The club had already brought on Gant, Clyde Best, Willie Anderson, and John Bain. “The league itself was starting to become a lot more professional. And, you know, players were starting to come here, and Portland had a great reputation of being a good soccer city. The fans took care of us… the Timbers Army was started back then. And it was well looked at throughout the league, as well, as a great little soccer town.”

The team started to cohere, with Clive at its center. “Clive was the type of guy that was always talking and wanting to do things,” says Gant, who paints a picture of that time as a kind of summer camp. Much of the team lived in the same area in Beaverton, and they started going to lunch together every day. At lunch, they’d make plans for the rest of the day—golf if it was nice or pool if it wasn’t, always competitive. “Pretty soon, you had this whole group of guys that were all of a sudden not just connected on the soccer field, but connected off the soccer field.”

Clive called everyone by a nickname. Gant, who is tall and lanky, was Spider Man or Spidey, and eventually just Ganty; Clive himself was Charlo or Chazzy or the Dean of Divot, on the golf course. “We all knew it wasn’t to make fun of the person. It was to make that person feel special. Like, ‘oh, I got I got this title!’” He had that effect on people, of making them feel special.

There was no spotlight for an NASL player. The crowds weren’t huge, and many fans didn’t really understand the game. But they were enthusiastic, in part because Clive and his teammates spent time selling the game of soccer to the community. Clive could make friends with anybody, and the team as a whole was accessible on a level that’s unthinkable today. There were signings at Fred Meyer; after games, the team would go to the bar at the Hilton or the Benson and someone would invite them to their kid’s birthday, and they would actually go. “We’d show up at a party and say hi to the kids, play soccer with the kids in the backyard,” says Gant. “And you know, get a free meal.”

A few years later, like so many American leagues, the NASL went under. Clive spent the last few years of his career playing indoor soccer, which he reportedly hated, bouncing from Pittsburgh to LA. Eventually he and his wife Clarena came back to Portland, drawn by the growing soccer community the Timbers had sown. Back home, players of Clive’s caliber were a dime a dozen—and for a Black man, the outlook was especially poor. “He said, ‘Ganty, if I go back to England, all retired soccer players, all they want to do is open up a pub.’” He didn’t want that. He wanted to build something.

2. Tiffeny

It is the early 1980s. Clive is putting flyers under windshield wipers at a strip mall in Gresham.

Clive was a product of the West Ham academy, and he had a vision for Portland: a development pipeline from the youth level up through college, a place for local kids to get real training and grow into world-class talents.

But first he had to find the kids. So he and his fellow coaches, including Gant, would xerox a stack of pamphlets advertising a weekend- or week-long camp and pass them out all over town. Before long, they were booked for a whole summer, and Clive had secured a sponsorship from Fred Meyer.

It was at one of those camps that a particular kid, seven or eight years old, caught Clive’s attention. Tiffeny Milbrett was the only girl on the field, and Clive was transfixed. “He said, ‘oh my god, this kid is something else,’” remembers Gant. Their meeting was to set into motion a chain of events that ends with the Thorns becoming the best-supported women’s club in the world.

At that time, high-level women’s soccer basically didn’t exist. It wasn’t an NCAA sport until 1982; the first World Cup wouldn’t happen until 1991. Clive had grown up in a country whose governing body refused to sanction women’s competitions. But he didn’t bat an eye to see a girl dominating her age level.

“[That’s the] biggest thing with him, because even in this day and age,” says Milbrett, “there’s still plenty of men who don’t want to respect women in general, let alone respect women playing sports… I mean, we didn’t even have names for it back then, and he truly was a human being that, literally across the board, he was going to give the same respect and attention.”

He quickly became not just Milbrett’s coach, but a mentor and a role model. “He adored that kid,” says Gant, “ not only as a soccer player but as a person.”

Milbrett calls Clive “the most important male influence in my life. Most people probably just thought he was my coach, but he really influenced me in a very strong way through the game.”

From a young age, she was independent and confident, both on and off the field. Growing up with a single mom who had to leave for work early every day, she was often responsible for herself. “I think I’m very independent because of how I grew up,” Milbrett says. “And Clive really was one of the first top-level coaches that, it was ok to be a very, very strong, independent, confident woman. He was never, ever afraid of strong women. Ever. And you have far too many men, even the ones that say that their coach is 100% to the women’s side—I’m sorry, I experienced too many men that even in the women’s game, they can’t handle strong women.”

Where many coaches use their authority like a cudgel and feel threatened by questions or dissent, Clive saw Milbrett’s independence as an asset and nurtured it, helping her grow into the fearless goalscorer she became. “Tiffeny was the vision,” says Gant. “Clive said, I want a team full of those… that’s why he said, ‘we’ve got to have FC Portland, we’ve got to have that. We’ve got to develop these kids.’”

Photo courtesy of FC Portland

By 1987, he’d scrapped the clinics and started FC Portland, where Milbrett trained through the end of high school. By that point, Clive had been coaching the University of Portland men for a few years, and it was largely because of a desire to keep coaching Milbrett that he agreed to take over the women’s program, too.

UP was a small school, and Clive relied on his personality and his reputation as a coach, rather than the reputation of his program, to draw players. Anson Dorrance, who had helped push the NCAA to recognize women’s soccer as a collegiate sport, was drawing the vast majority of the top talent to North Carolina. “When Clive was picking players,” Gant says, “The first thing he did, he says, ‘I got to have quality character.’… so many of the girls that played for Clive that made the program so special were hard-working players. They’re good, honest citizens, good, honest students. They weren’t necessarily the best players throughout the country.”

Of course, there were exceptions, genuine world-class talents who came through UP. Milbrett was one; Shannon MacMillan, who Milbrett overlapped with, was another. Then there’s the GOAT herself.

3: Sinc

It is 2001. Christine Sinclair has just started at UP.

It wasn’t a coincidence that Sinc ended up in Portland. Clive had been a presence in her life before she was born. “My parents used to actually rent a house from him and Clarena up in Canada,” she told me a few years ago (Clarena is Canadian, and the couple had considered moving to Vancouver after Clive’s playing career). Clive didn’t just build women’s soccer in Portland, he built its most important player, kind of literally.

Sinc choosing UP was the natural outcome, but not just because her family knew Clive. As a shy 18-year-old, she needed a nurturing environment like his program. “I think I would have gotten lost in some of those bigger schools,” she said when she signed with the Thorns.

Photo by Darren Lloyd

“She came here for the way [he mentored] people,” says Gant, “and because Sinc’s a pretty quiet kid, for the most part. She’s pretty quiet. And she was like that growing up.”

Sinc would probably have become a legend wherever she’d gone to college, but it’s less clear she would have become the kind of legend she is—the respected leader, the consummate teammate—without Clive’s influence. Clive was gregarious and charming where Sinc is quiet and thoughtful, but if you’ve heard Sinc’s teammates talk about her, listening to people who were close to Clive talk about him sounds familiar.

“It’s full and complete and total trust,” Milbrett says of him as a coach, “because first and foremost, he was just an outstanding human being to you. And that’s how you build up a player, that’s how you build up a person—building that kind of relationship through trust.”

Sinc could have gone to any school in the country. By her 18th birthday, she had already scored 21 goals for Canada, and she’d gotten a stack of scholarship offers. But she didn’t want to go to the most successful program; she wanted the coach who cared about her. “He was the only coach I talked to who was actually interested in me as a person,” she wrote in 2012. “For people who have ever been recruited, this is very unique.”

Clive would rib Sinc about her shyness, and soon she’d start teasing him back. As they got to know each other, she started to come out of her shell and speak up, where she’d usually stayed on the fringe when she was younger. “She toughened up a lot, coming to college,” Gant remembers. “You know, she learned to respect her voice. And she learned to communicate with teammates and coaches, and it really changed who she was as a person, I think.”

The Pilots went 16–3 Sinc’s freshman season and were eliminated in the College Cup semifinal by North Carolina. Sinc notched 23 goals, eight of them game winners. That spring, Clive called together “the Pilot soccer family, current and past players,” as Sinc wrote, and gave them the news: he’d been battling a rare form of prostate cancer for two years, after being diagnosed while coaching the US men at the 2000 Olympics. He intended to keep coaching, but nobody knew how much time he had left.

2002

The Pilots faithful, a few hundred strong in purple and white, greeted the team at the airport. They’d brought their drums along and chanted so loud the TSA agents couldn’t hear the metal detectors.

Photo by Darren Lloyd

The team had been victorious in Austin; after they’d gone down 0­–1 early in the second half, Sinc had leveled the score in the 61st minute, then scored the sudden-death game winner in overtime. Several players described a feeling that divine intervention was at work during the tournament. Clive said the win was “like a ten-ton weight has been lifted off me” and vowed not to let the trophy out of his sight. Supposedly he slept with it next to him that night.

Clive passed away in August of 2003. That championship win was the last game he ever coached. His players kept his memory alive, and the Pilots won another in 2005.

The kids and families and queer women who cheered the team on from the Chiles Center, many of them, would go on to form the Rose City Riveters. They’d learned how to love soccer at UP, and they helped show the world what support for a women’s club could look like.

Clive left an impression on everyone he ever met, and changed the lives of countless people he never did meet. His legacy goes way beyond this story. But it’s hard to overstate what he did for women’s soccer. The Riveters wouldn’t be what they are without UP, the Thorns wouldn’t be what they are without the Riveters, and the NWSL wouldn’t be what it is without the Thorns. None of it would have happened without Clive.

Sinc, of course, went on to become a giant in the game, planted firmly in Portland since her college days. Her dog is named Charlie in Clive’s honor.

After retiring in 2011, Milbrett started coaching, a career that took her to Colorado and Florida. Now she’s back on the Bluff, coaching on a part-time basis.

Gant stayed on at FC Portland, where he still works today. When he ponders where Clive might have been now, he suspects he would have moved on from coaching and taken an administrative job in the game. It’s easy to imagine him as the Thorns GM, or a league commissioner.

“He loved coaching,” says Gant. “But it was about the game, too. It was about, how far can we take this game? And I remember when he was coaching the [2000] Olympic team, he felt bad because it was time away from his UP kids and time away from Portland and Clarena and all that. But he says ‘Ganty, the game—it’s a global game now. It’s everywhere. It’s unbelievable.’ And you know, he’d just been diagnosed with cancer and everything. And it got emotional at times, because when he started talking about it, he sort of said, ‘and I might miss it.’”

Categories
Not Soccer

Absolutely Tremendous News, Everyone

George Inness, The Lackawanna Valley (c. 1856)

I have wonderfully exciting news to share, which is that I have met a small pig named Hiram. This is Hiram:

Hiram

I met Hiram because I have been riding a horse named Rusty once a week. I am a former Horse Girl and was introduced to Rusty via my college job board, where her owner was seeking out volunteers to come be friends with her. This is Rusty:

Rusty

I was riding Rusty in the pasture and suddenly she would not stop staring at something on the other side of the fence. We went over to investigate and the thing she was staring at was a little pig with splotches. She was so enthralled that the ride immediately became over.

Hiram and Rusty

Rusty tried to make friends with Hiram but he was not interested. I wanted to give Hiram some scritches but he was also not interested in those, which I respect. We were lucky simply to be in his presence.

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Soccer Thorns

Draft Recap: Who’s Who and Where This Leaves the Thorns Roster

Yazmeen Ryan (photo courtesy of TCU Athletics)

The NWSL held its first-ever virtual college draft last Wednesday evening. Like so much of modern life, it was confusing and tiring. For one thing, constant time-outs made it an excruciatingly slow-moving event, with the first round taking almost a full two hours to wrap up. More importantly, the whole thing was shrouded in uncertainty after the pandemic forced the league and the NCAA to hammer out some new rules.

First, seniors taken in the draft are allowed to choose whether to play in the NCAA’s upcoming spring season and report to their NWSL teams afterward, or forgo their final year of eligibility and go straight to the pros. Second, all NCAA seniors were eligible for selection in the draft, whether they declared for it or not.

While that uncertainty loomed large, and in some cases may have forced teams to rethink their plans, Mark Parsons said during the draft that it didn’t significantly impact the Thorns’ preparations. “We’d done more homework than we ever have” leading into the draft, he said. “We had done that homework because we felt we could improve on last year—there was one or two players we missed [in last year’s draft class].” The coaching staff put together profiles of 100 players and spoke to 67 ahead of the draft, assisted by college coaches who helped the club gauge whether players would be a good fit for Portland, on and off the field. After all that legwork, the rule change was almost incidental.

Unlike last year’s draft where the Thorns nabbed Sophia Smith, the team didn’t make any splashy big-name signings who will significantly change the team. Still, they did take the rights to four high-quality players who will provide depth in areas the Thorns need it, especially with the Olympics looming this summer.

There was, however, some behind-the-scenes drama when it came to Portland’s first pick, Yazmeen Ryan, who they took sixth in the first round. The Thorns went into the draft with the seventh overall pick, but after Racing Louisville selected Emma Ekic with the fifth pick, there was a long time-out, which ended with the announcement that the Chicago Red Stars had traded their number six pick to Portland in exchange for Portland’s seventh and 32nd picks and a 2021 international slot.

Parsons later explained that Portland had tried to trade up for the fourth overall pick in order to take Ryan, the Thorns’ top target, early on. However, it didn’t pan out because Kansas City offered Sky Blue $175,000 in allocation money for the same spot. “And then it was panic time,” Parsons said.

Although they knew Chicago wasn’t planning to take Ryan, the Thorns were concerned Rory Dames might trade that pick to a team who was interested in her. “We assured [Dames] the player he wants would be available, we just can’t have you trading to anywhere else and lose the opportunity to bring Yazmeen to Portland,” explained Parsons.

They were intent on Ryan for good reason, as she’s a player Parsons believes could contribute to the Thorns right now. She’s an attacking midfielder who looks both to score with late runs into the box and to feed her teammates with well-timed through balls. She could be a real asset in that role during the summer Olympics, when Portland will lose Christine Sinclair, Crystal Dunn, Lindsey Horan, and likely Sophia Smith. Ryan has also taken penalties and set pieces for TCU.

Portland’s next selection, Sam Coffey, is a midfielder out of Penn State who’s comfortable in a box-to-box role. She’s good both on and off the ball, has excellent vision, and can dictate the course of a game. “I think Sam Coffey could play for us right now,” said Parsons, “but she could also keep growing, keep improving.”

Amirah Ali, who Portland took 22nd overall, looks like a somewhat longer-term prospect. She’s a forward who, in Parsons’s words, “receives the ball under pressure back to goal, can twist and turn, can run at people, can finish. She can impact now,” he continues, “but I do think there’s going to be a journey for her […] her character is key. I feel she can come in and learn from some of the best players in the world around her, and I think she can learn from this coaching staff.”

Finally, Hannah Betfort is a converted forward from Wake Forest who’s played at both outside back and center back. She’s a leader on her college squad, serving as captain since 2019. She has strong passing and tackling numbers and also contributes offensively—notably tallying seven assists since moving to defense. Betfort, too, looks like a longer-term prospect, as Portland’s defense is already piled high.

With this year’s eligibility extension, how many of these players will report straight to preseason, and how many will want to play their senior college season in the spring? Players don’t have to announce their decision until the 22nd, so at this point, we don’t know. However, Parsons did tell the media that not all the draftees will be in Portland for the start of preseason. In particular, he hinted that Coffey wants to play her last college season, saying she’d been “terrorizing everyone” this fall and “she’ll want to do that in the NCAA tournament as well, fingers crossed.”

The bottom line, though, is this: “We know what their current plans are before we pick them, and we’ll respect that and wait for that phone call.”

So where does this leave the Thorns’ roster, and how will they line up? Trying to guess is a fool’s errand (read: I’m bad at it), but here are two possibilities we think are plausible. The first option is to keep the diamond and use Dunn and Smith up top. If Sinc isn’t available, either Dunn or Ryan could slot in at the No. 10.

Graphic by Nikita Taparia; contract info courtesy of Jen Cooper

Another possibility, given Portland’s stack of defenders, is something like the 5-3-2 the Thorns used for most of 2017.

Graphic by Nikita Taparia; contract info courtesy of Jen Cooper
Categories
Soccer Thorns

After an Unconventional Path, Natalia Kuikka’s Next Stop is Portland

Photo courtesy of Connect Management Group

Ever since Natalia Kuikka, the 24-year-old Finnish defender who signed with the Thorns this offseason, graduated from Florida State at the end of 2018, she’s had a return to the US on her mind. After wrapping up a two-year contract with Göteborg—and winning the league in the 2020 season—the timing was right, both for her and the Thorns. She was ready for a new challenge, while Portland needs to bolster an aging back line after losing two starters in the last year.

Kuikka’s career has taken an unusual trajectory in several senses. First, rather than go pro—something many Americans think of as the obvious choice for talented young Europeans—she opted to go to Tallahassee to play for Mark Krikorian’s Seminoles and earn a degree. Once that chapter closed (ending with an NCAA championship), she made another surprising choice and opted out of the 2019 NWSL College Draft, despite being a top prospect.

Both choices have worked out. Contrary to the belief, now orthodoxy in some American soccer circles, that professional clubs are always a better development pipeline than college, Kuikka’s experience at FSU shaped her in important ways, both as a player and as a person.

When asked about what she learned in the States, it’s the latter that comes to mind first. “I grew a lot when I was there,” she said via Zoom. “I learned things about myself…I always knew that football and soccer is what I want to do, but then being in college, I figured out that there’s another part of me that’s not an athlete, and there’s other things I like to do.”

Being in the US and balancing soccer with school gave her opportunities players don’t get on a grueling European club schedule. “I started exploring and had a little bit more time to do traveling and seeing the world,” she says. “I think that it gave me more motivation to learn and experience, and see things in not just my perspective, but learning from others, and putting myself in others’ shoes…There’s so many different cultures and things to experience in the USA.”

Meanwhile, Krikorian’s impact on her development as a player was enormous. After recruiting her as a winger and playing her there during her freshman season, he decided to see how she’d do in central defense. “I don’t even know how it came to be,” she says. “I remember being called to Mark’s office, and he said something like, ‘We’re going to try to do some new things, and you might not play in your normal position, but don’t worry.’ I’m like, okay, whatever. It’s spring. And then we had a practice game against Boston Breakers at the time, and he [played me] as a center back, and after that, he just kept putting me there.”

As far as what qualities of Kuikka’s gave Krikorian this idea, she laughs and says “I don’t know!” She wasn’t totally new to defending—she was already playing left back for Finland—but she was very much an attacker, notching six goals and five assists in her freshman season.

If converting forwards into defenders is another American cliché, it’s also a move we typically associate with outside back, a position that requires speed, offensive aptitude, and a willingness to make lung-busting runs up and down the wing, on top of defensive chops. There’s quite a bit of overlap, in other words, with the role of a winger—something that’s much less true of central defense. But Kuikka stepped up to the challenge. “[Mark Krikorian] started talking about leadership and stepping up for the teammates and all this, and I couldn’t really say no,” she says.

As counterintuitive as the switch sounds, Kuikka’s experience playing higher up the field is evident watching her on the back line. She’s a gritty defender in one-on-one situations, but she’s also supremely calm and confident on the ball. She isn’t fazed by onrushing forwards and is rarely pressured into clearances. On top of that, she has excellent passing range, and it’s clear that even at center back, she still thinks of the game in offensive terms. Although she enjoys defending, she says, “I do like being involved in the game—opening the game and kind of being in control—I like that. So I think [Krikorian] kind of saw that as well.”

“I think playing as a winger and in a more attacking role, and now playing in defense,” she adds, “I know what kind of movements the wingers and attackers would do, and what I would do in that position, so it’s maybe giving me a little bit—I’ll be [more] prepared with those things as well.”

As to where she slots in in Portland, Kuikka says she’s had conversations with Mark Parsons, but there won’t be any final decisions until she joins the team. Portland doesn’t want for quality center backs in Sauerbrunn and Emily Menges, but in the short term, Kuikka adds crucial depth there, and would be a great option if the Thorns ever trot out the back three again. She’s also not likely to start over Kling at left back, but given that she’s naturally right-footed, it’s easy to imagine her becoming the first choice at right back. It’s also not impossible to see her at the No. 6, though that’s a position the Thorns are quite deep at.

Talking to Kuikka, another reason she caught Parsons’s interest quickly becomes obvious: She has the team-first attitude he praises in the team’s leaders and talks about working year after year to cultivate. She’s also a proven quantity as a leader, having captained the Seminoles during her junior and senior seasons. She comes across as thoughtful and understated, always bringing the focus back to contributing to the team.

“I’ll do whatever for the team, and what’s best for the team,” she says, referring to her positional switch. “If [what’s] best for the team is me playing as a center back, I took that challenge, and focused on the next summer, playing as a center back in the summer leagues and making sure I can be the best center back for my team that I can be.”

As far as opting out of the draft, in addition to giving Kuikka a chance to be closer to family and to the Finnish national team, which had just hired a new coach at the time, it also gave her a control over her fate most draftees don’t get. She was able to choose to sign with Göteborg, and then, a few years later, to choose Portland. “I just kind of wanted to have something familiar and safe,” she says—she spent a summer in the Pacific Northwest in college, playing for Seattle Sounders Women, and still has ties in the area—”yet something new.”

The philosophy of the Thorns coaching staff appealed to her, too. “The player approach was what I was looking for,” she says. “The way Mark wants to develop the players and wants the best for the players.” Unsurprisingly, the fans were also a factor: “I’ve always wanted to play in a big crowd, so that was a big thing for me.”

“I think at the end for me, it was a pretty easy choice to go for Portland.”

Categories
Soccer Thorns

We Had Fucking Tobin Heath

Photo by Nikita Taparia

I think deep down I knew as soon as Tobin Heath announced she wouldn’t be playing in the Challenge Cup that she was never coming back. It just felt that way.

Like the rest of you, I spent a few weeks preparing for the expansion draft. I had mapped out what was likely, what I would have done if I was in charge, what I thought was unlikely but possible. I steeled myself hardest against the likeliest outcome, thinking, we’ll miss those players, we’ll empathize with the disruption this causes in their lives, but at least they’ll get a well-deserved chance to start for a team that they will make better.

Then the unlikely thing happened instead. I was surprised by how much it stung.

Five years ago, I started writing about the Thorns because I really, really liked them. I still do. But as you get pulled slowly but surely out of the “fan” column and into the “media” column, things change. You gain some detachment. Everything feels less life-or-death. You start thinking of things in terms of individual actors making the best decisions they can, rather than your team versus other teams and good versus bad.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

So the media part of me wants to start by saying that it’s probably wrong to think of this as something the Thorns did to Tobin Heath. Under the rules of the draft, their protected list made sense. They protected the two most important allocated players who aren’t currently on loan abroad, and Louisville took a really big gamble that no one expected them to take. I also don’t know, but I hope, that this isn’t the end of the world for Tobin, and that whatever happens next is a net positive in her life.

I’m not sure I would have had those thoughts five years ago. The thought I would have had, and still do have, is that I am sad anyway, and all the context in the world doesn’t change that. Tobin Heath occupies a unique slot in my brain: she was my first favorite Thorn.

I have read that music you first hear when you’re young sticks with you more strongly than music you encounter later, because your brain is still forming. Your neural circuitry somehow physically molds itself around those sounds and the experiences that go along with them. You lose that ability once you hit age 25 or so. To this day, I find Tobin uniquely thrilling to watch, the same way hearing “Once in a Lifetime” makes me feel like a teenager again.

When I first started watching the Thorns, I didn’t know very much about soccer. Tobin stood out because she’s so clearly different from anyone else. She’s built different and she moves different, all jagged angles and splayed limbs, awkward and graceful at once. She catches your eye just by how she moves on the ball, and then she does something like rainbow a defender, and that pretty much seals it. You have to be awfully humorless not to find a little bit of joy in that.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

The first Thorns game I watched from the press box was their 2016 home opener, which was the Orlando Pride’s debut as a club, and it felt very big and laden with symbolism in a way I’m not sure I could register anymore. It was a break in the life of both the club and the league: Mark Parsons’s first game as head coach, the first-ever fourth season of women’s professional soccer in America. Alex Morgan’s departure that offseason had felt like the club growing up. Hard as it is to fathom now, there were people who questioned whether the Thorns would maintain their popularity without Morgan’s talismanic star power. Morgan and Heath clasped hands before the game, each now the face of a different club, and you could feel that Heath had always belonged here in a way Morgan never did.

And she owned that game. Before that season, she’d played relatively few minutes for Portland, thanks to injury and international duty. That first game of 2016 was like an announcement that she was really here for the club, and she was going to do things nobody else could do. I remember few details from the game, but one improbable trick of physics sticks in my head, where she flicked the ball into the air and somehow guided it right, then left, in a midair elastico, and the wildest part was that this worked and she beat her defender.

After the game, she walked into the presser with the captain’s armband hanging off her sleeve by one strip of velcro and talked about wanting to give everything to this club. She grinned that big Tobin Heath grin, giddy with excitement like an overgrown kid. Parsons said, “we’ve got fucking Tobin Heath.” I felt giddy too.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

What Parsons said quickly became a meme, but it did mean something real: he saw that this wasn’t just another good player, but one who deserved to have an offense built around her. With her on the team, the only logical thing to do was get the ball to her as much as possible.

And yet, that never quite happened. It’s a little ironic that Tobin’s best season in Portland, in 2018, was one that also saw Lindsey Horan ascend to godhood, and ended with Jessica McDonald tearing off her jersey in Providence Park to reveal an undershirt reading “JESUS PAID THE PRICE”. Her second best season, in 2016, had ended similarly, against the Flash. The year they beat the Courage, the offensive scheme Parsons had built around her had to be scrapped midseason due to a nagging injury, and she played just four games before the playoffs.

There was often this almost-ness around her presence on the team: she’s almost healthy enough to play, the Thorns have almost hit their stride, but just wait until Tobin gets back from the Olympics. She never quite became the face of the team; there were just too many other faces in town.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Still, it feels wrong to imagine her not being here. There aren’t too many other stars in this league who’ve been with the same club for so long, who seem to really like their clubs as much as she did. It’s a cruel twist that her time in Portland ends without her in Portland at all, in a year where no fans even set foot in Providence Park.

It’s also a bookend for me. I’m turning 30 in a few days, so the timing here is a little on the nose. Heath was the first soccer player I ever interviewed, a few weeks after that 2016 opener, for a short sidebar in Portland Monthly. I had no idea what I was doing, but she was gracious and thoughtful and it made me feel capable. I’ve long wanted to do a big, in-depth feature on her, but time marched on and I never quite got around to it.

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Soccer Thorns

Please, Come and Gaze into Our Crystal Ball

Photo by Matthew Wolfe
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Soccer Thorns

Thorns Sign Finnish Defender Natalia Kuikka

The Thorns have announced the signing of Finnish international Natalia Kuikka. Kuikka is a defender out of Florida State who captained the Seminoles when they won the 2018 NCAA championship. She was projected as a potential top-five pick in the 2019 college draft, but opted out to sign with Kopparbergs/Göteborg FC in the Swedish Damallsvenskan, where she’s currently in her second season.

This signing likely means the Thorns are expecting to lose defenders in the offseason, whether to the expansion draft or elsewhere. Before the Fall Series, Mark Parsons hinted at doubts around Katherine Reynolds’s future, saying she planned to reevaluate her options going forward after suffering a concussion in the quarterfinal of the Challenge Cup. At age 33 and having dealt with a string of injuries in recent years, it doesn’t seem unlikely that retirement is among those options.

Kuikka has played as a center back both in Sweden and for FSU, but she started her college career as a winger. Thus, it’s plausible that Portland may be bringing her in as an option at outside back as well, a position they’re currently thinner at than they are in central defense.

Regardless of who ends up staying or leaving during this offseason, this also looks like a smart longer-term move for the Thorns, who have several defenders in their 30s, including not just Reynolds but Becky Sauerbrunn and Meghan Klingenberg. Kuikka is a smart, physically strong defender who stood out at FSU for her confidence on the ball and ability to play out of the back in coach Mark Krikorian’s possession-oriented system.

Categories
Soccer Thorns

Crystal Dunn? Crystal Dunn.

Photo by Matt Wolfe

Unless you’ve had your head under a rock for the last six hours, you’ve likely heard the news: Crystal Dunn is a Thorn.

It’s not poppycock this time—thanks to OL Reign taking one for the team(s) and “facilitating” the trade. The 2019 World Cup Champion, two-time NWSL Champion, NWSL golden boot winner and MVP of the 2015 season’s move to Portland (finally) extends beyond the offseason.

In exchange, the Thorns sent the Reign $150,000, a 2021 international slot, and Portland’s natural first-round pick in the 2022 college draft. Here are a few of our takeaways about the big news:

[incoherent screaming]

With multiple expansion drafts on the horizon and no clear answer to whether soccer in the traditional sense will even be possible in 2021, the Thorns’ future—like that of many teams in this league—is uncertain (more on that in a minute). What looks pretty watertight at this juncture is that Portland’s midfield is going to involve all of Lindsey Horan, Crystal Dunn, and Christine Sinclair.

Those players aren’t going anywhere, which is, uh, crazy? It feels like cheating. Then again, when Dunn went to North Carolina, that also felt like cheating—so maybe what it boils down to is that having Crystal Dunn is cheating.

Dunn is one of the few players in the world who can genuinely bend a game to her will. She can score practically at will and is equally dangerous at both dribbling and passing. She’s a defensive threat, too. It’s hard to overstate how huge an acquisition she is for the Thorns, especially when you start to think about her connecting with oh, say, Sophia Smith.

What does this mean for the expansion draft?

This looks like a superteam for now, but not so fast. Three expansion drafts are looming in the next two years, with one—for Racing Louisville—happening in less than a month. Don’t expect this to be the last move Portland makes this offseason.

Assuming the rules are the same as they were in 2015, the Thorns will be able to protect nine players, including two USWNT-subsidized players. As things stand, the two protected subsidized players have to be Dunn and Horan. We’d already expected them to lose at least one keeper, likely AD Franch, but now she, Heath, and Sauerbrunn will all be on the chopping block. (Sophia Smith is blissfully saved by the fact that USWNT allocations won’t be announced until after the expansion draft.) Sauerbrunn probably doesn’t get taken—she’s 35 and has made it clear she wants to settle down in Portland. We think she tells any interested team she’ll retire rather than report.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Heath? Harder to say. She also owns a home here and clearly likes playing for the Thorns. She also holds the same leverage as any elite player in this league: she can always decide to extend her time in Manchester rather than move to Louisville or Sacramento. However: it’s not hard to imagine, say, Louisville picking up her rights, her deciding to stay in England for 2021, and then forcing a trade to LA for 2022.

Of course, that’s assuming the Thorns can scam them into taking the rights of someone who probably doesn’t plan on playing for them, but the Thorns have a pretty solid track record when it comes to taking advantage of other teams (see: The Alex Morgan Trade). That’s also assuming Angel City wants Heath on their side, but it’s hard to imagine a team saying no to her if she asks.

The No. 10 problem, solved

We’ve all been dreading/denying the inevitable: that one day, sure as the cruel sea beats cliffs into sand, Christine Sinclair will have to retire. That she’s had an almost unbelievably long and consistent career doesn’t change how problematic this is for the Thorns in the long term.

A situation that we think epitomizes this pretty well was last year, when the Thorns tried three different players at the No. 10 while Sinclair was away for the World Cup. Dagný Brynjarsdóttir, Ana Crnogorčević, and Andressinha—may she be free forevermore—are all good players, but the team’s reliance on an all-time great in that position showed in her absence.

Dunn is the answer to that, positionally at least. As far as Sinclair’s importance to the locker room, there’s of course no real replacement, but Mark Parsons seems to think Dunn has some of the same qualities as a leader, too. “She has such a contagious energy about her that just wants to make you be better when you’re around her,” he said in an interview released by the team today. “But what she doesn’t get praise enough for is her leadership, and the way that she leads. By example, and by being positive, and by being driven. She’s had a lot of success, and it’s not by luck.”

Categories
Soccer Thorns

Where in the World is Christine Sinclair?

Photo by Matt Wolfe

After shellacking the Reign 4–1 midweek, the Thorns headed to Utah on three days’ rest and managed to grind out a 1–1 draw against the Royals. It’s been a fun week for the Thorns; some of my takeaways from both matches are below.

1. How does this keep happening?

Below I have made some helpful visuals showing how the Thorns scored their first goal on Wednesday:

Somehow Allie Long—2019 World Cup champion Allie Long—just… didn’t notice Christine Sinclair behind her? And then by the time she did, she just thought, “Ah, well! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

Long isn’t the only one who’s been doing this, though. Here is a similar thing happening in Utah on Saturday. Every single person in this photo except Mallory Weber seems to have their eyes fixed on Lindsey Horan:

Crucial to note here that Sinc did score this, although Abby Smith got a hand on it and the sideline ref didn’t see it go over the line, so it didn’t count. Later on, when it happened again, it did count, to bring the score to 1–1:

So: one way of looking at this is that these teams are defending poorly, and that’s undoubtedly true. If you know the first thing about Christine Sinclair, you have to know not to let her get an open shot on goal like this. You have to know that a loose ball in the box, like that third example, is a huge liability. This is her whole thing! She’s been doing it since she was 16!

On the other hand, I think it’s also fair to look at these as examples of the Thorns offense working the way it’s supposed to. In the Reign example, as hilarious as it is seeing Sinc just tiptoe right behind Long and into that big gaping hole, the hole itself is there because Tyler Lussi’s done an excellent (arguably equally hilarious) job pulling a center back, Amber Brooks, out of position, whereupon Horan easily sprints past her and Taylor Smith to send in a cross.

The second incident seems to be largely Katie Bowen’s fault. She’s marking Sinc on the corner preceding this goal/not-goal, and loses track of her completely as Christen Westphal sends the ball in toward Horan. But! This is also a smart, well-worked play that relies on a great service from Westphal; Horan then bamboozles everybody in using her aerial ability to create a chance rather than go for goal.

The third example, again, is easy to dismiss as sloppy defending from a group of players who should know that this type of situation is Sinclair’s bread and butter (along with some sloppy goalkeeping by Abby Smith), and that’s certainly true—but it’s also true that to create this chance, Horan had to send a cross past Bowen, and Simone Charley had to be in the right place and have the wherewithal to win the 50/50 ball and knock it over to Sinc.

2. But Katelyn what about Lindsey Horan

Stop yelling at me! Obviously, there’s another common denominator here, one that my pandemic-addled brain, increasingly poor at spotting patterns, didn’t process until after I drew all over those screenshots: Lindsey “h*cking” Horan.

We’ve spoken about this before, during and in the wake of the Challenge Cup. Having lost Hayley Raso, Caitlin Foord, and (temporarily) Tobin Heath, the Thorns found themselves thin on natural wide threats. They also needed a midfield scheme that would get all of their best players on the field. The solution was a diamond midfield where Horan and Rocky Rodríguez spend a lot of time out wide, both to help mark opposing outside backs and in the attack.

In different games, Horan has spent varying amounts of time attacking from wide areas, but she’s been surprisingly effective in that kind-of winger role. She attempted four crosses in each of the last two games, just one less than Meghan Klingenberg did against the Reign. (Kling had to sit out over the weekend due to a ludicrous special Fall Series yellow card accumulation rule.) She’s not nearly as accurate a crosser as Kling, but even when those crosses don’t find targets, she’s still creating chances with the help of onrushing forwards ready to scoop up loose balls.

She also, crucially, tends to draw defenders toward her, opening up space for teammates—something that’s been especially effective for Sinc, whose deeper-lying role relies on those spaces when it comes to scoring.

Photo by Matt Wolfe
3. Ok, but

The thing I just said is true, but I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to bask in Sinc’s third goal on Wednesday. Aged 37 and showing no regard for the law, she dribbled effortlessly and cruelly past four (4) Reign defenders. She had just been dunked on by Bethany Balcer and decided to show the damned kids on her lawn who they were messing with. I found the exact spot in the highlights for you :).

4. An ordered list of my favorite things that have happened since last Wednesday
  1. Rocky Rodríguez goal
  2. Christine Sinclair goal (third one)
  3. Christine Sinclair goal (first one)
  4. Rocky Rodríguez yelling “golazo” after scoring
  5. Simone Charley cross to Rocky Rodríguez
  6. Meghan Klingenberg delivering a pregame speech via Bluetooth speaker
  7. Becky Sauerbrunn making a run all the way into the box and almost getting on the end of another Simone Charley cross
  8. Tziarra King (I’m sorry but she’s a star) (I’m not sorry)
Categories
Soccer Thorns

What a Beautiful Day for a Ballgame

Photo by Kris Lattimore

When I went to watch minor league baseball as a kid (let’s go Ems) they used to play this very corny song before the games which, for some reason, came to me vividly today as I waited for the Thorns to kick off. I think I had the thought, “wow, what a beautiful day for soccer,” and it took hold from there.

It was, honestly, perfect. It was the ideal temperature, the sun was shining off the turf, Prince was blaring from the speakers. I think the ball game song also captures the kind of borderline-unstable giddiness that results from going to do one relatively normal thing after six months of not doing anything normal. The singers sound faintly like someone is physically forcing them to enjoy things as much as they are, but believe me when I say the fun feels just as good regardless of whether it’s being forced upon you. First takeaway: soccer games are really great and I can’t wait for you guys to get to go to them again. Some of my other takeaways are below.

1. Say her name

The Thorns made a powerful statement as they filed onto the field before the game, which I assume they’d been planning for what was supposed to be a nationally televised game against the Reign last weekend:

“[159] days ago, Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, was fatally shot by police officers of the Louisville Metro Police Department. There has not been an arrest of her killers.”

The three Black players on the Thorns roster wore shirts reading “I am Breonna Taylor,” and the last two players onto the field wore the words “please vote.” The display echoed statements by WNBA players.

2. Really good day for the Thorns, really bad day for the Royals

Two Thursdays ago when the Thorns held what was supposed to be their pre-OL Reign press conference, Emily Menges mentioned that one positive of the Fall Series is that the team gets to address some of the issues they had during the Challenge Cup right away. One of those issues was goal scoring. In Utah, the Thorns had just three goals in six games—the same number they scored in 90 minutes today. After today’s win, Mark Parsons noted that this swing isn’t quite as extreme as it looks on the surface: in Utah, the offense was better than that number made it look, and today, the attack improved, but not as drastically as you’d think from the scoreline.

For the most part, a lot of what worked well at the Challenge Cup worked well today, too. Except for a couple moments in the second half where they almost got caught in transition, the defense stayed organized. The basic concept of the midfield diamond is still a good fit for the available players. But Utah, spending much of the game defending low, was mostly able to limit Portland through the middle of the field, forcing them to play wide through Meghan Klingenberg (who was excellent), with Lindsey Horan and Christine Sinclair often popping up in wide areas, too. They didn’t often succeed in attacking centrally.

This is fine if it works, which it did today. It has to be said, though, that this is a tough time for the Royals. We learned on the broadcast today that head coach Craig Harrington had been placed on “a leave of absence” after the ongoing investigation in the wake of Dell Loy Hansen’s departure from the club turned up evidence he had made inappropriate comments to staff members. Amy LePeilbet has been serving as interim coach. Dealing with that, on top of the existing fallout around a reportedly racist, sexist team culture, has to have affected this team, and I’m not convinced this Thorns offense would pull the same thing off against a more organized opponent.

3. Simone!

When I talk about being subjected to fun, this is what I mean:

Hook this straight into my fucking veins. This is what I need to survive the winter.

On a more serious note: first, let’s just appreciate how much Simone Charley has grown in the last three years. She’s always had the guts and the desire to dribble, but she’s finally at the point where she can do this in a game and get away with it. As Parsons pointed out postgame, that’s all down to two seasons of relentless hard work, one of them unpaid.

Second, let’s step back and think about what this means for the team. The mythical goalscoring forward has long been prophesied for the Thorns, but never quite seems to materialize. Caitlin Foord and Ana Crnogorčević both disappointed in that sense. In Charley, they now have a player who’s just as hard-working as her predecessors but also capable of taking defenders on the dribble, both to open up space and take shots herself. Crucially, she also has a nose for goal. She’s still building consistency, but she just keeps getting better.

4. Sophia!

Speaking of goalscoring forwards: Sophia Smith!

It took six months longer than it should have, but the rookie finally made her professional debut, and she lived up to the hype. She scored just three minutes after subbing in for Charley, a gorgeous header off a recycled corner kick.

Everything I just said about Charley applies to Smith too, except at age 20 she’s already a polished professional-level player with a gorgeous touch and exceptional vision and decision-making. Smith could turn out to be the best Thorns acquisition since Lindsey Horan. Get excited.