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

Soccer in a Fifth Season

Portland in better times. Photo by Craig Mitchelldyer.

Last Monday morning, it was summer, and then in the space of 20 minutes, it became not-summer. The blue sky was gone, and suddenly it was windy and there was a sickly yellowish pall over everything. The evacuation notices started coming in a few hours later. I know three families who have had to flee their homes.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had smoke like this. In the summer of 2017, I lived on the poorly insulated third floor of a hundred-year old house. There was always a week or two in the summer when the temperature would get to 90 or 100° and the apartment became almost uninhabitable, and in a vain attempt to keep the temperature down, we’d leave the windows open and the curtains closed all the time. One morning I woke up to a fine layer of ash filtering in onto all the windowsills, and we simply had to shut the windows and leave. I slept in a friend’s basement.

Maybe this is the worst it’s ever been. I’m not sure. In some ways, it’s an improvement over that summer in 2017, in that the smoke is keeping the temperature down. The ash was thicker that year, too. You couldn’t go outside without it getting in your eyes, which stings like crazy.

And now: a soccer game

Supposedly, a Thorns game is happening on Tuesday. It was supposed to happen on Saturday, but when you can’t see across the Willamette and the sun looks like a perfect orange disc, I hear that’s a bad time to run around outside for 90 minutes. The Thorns didn’t train outside last Thursday, when they held their press conference, and I’d be surprised if they’d done so since. An NWSL spokesperson tells me that if the AQI is above 200, games are cancelled automatically, but an on-the-ground decision can be made below that level. I have not asked anyone, but I don’t think the league has an automatic cutoff for collective existential dread.

One of my dad’s friends lives out near Marcola, east of Springfield, and had to evacuate. He used to throw a big party every summer, which I didn’t like very much because everyone there was an adult and most were adults I didn’t know. My brother and I would wade in the creek and look for crawdads. The sun landed on the forest floor in a patchwork that shifted with the breeze.

The thing I’m not sure people outside of Oregon understand, hearing every summer about wildfires in the west, is that this corner of the state isn’t supposed to burn—not like this, anyway. I’ve lived on this side of the Cascades my whole life and I can’t remember a single fire here, certainly not a bad one, until the one in the Gorge three years ago. We’re on the wet side of a rain shadow, the part where the clouds coming off the ocean wring themselves out.

The only time I ever caught a fish was up past the Leaburg Dam when I was maybe eight. The fog was as thick as the smoke is right now. The hills up there, rising out of the river and dense with trees, look black, but if you walk into the forest it’s bright green and spacious. My dad and I ate lunch at Ike’s Pizza, which may or may not have burned to the ground this week.

Here’s where the roster is at, according to Mark Parsons:

“First of all, Kath Reynolds, who was carrying a small injury, then came on and took another injury… Kath Reynolds will not be available in the Fall Series, she’s opted out—carrying an injury into the Challenge Cup, then got injured again once she got back. I think she just needs a little bit more time, she’s doing great. She needs a bit more time to think about what she’s going to do going forward. We have Celeste Boureille on loan in France. We’re going to announce Meaghan Nally going on loan to Germany. Tobin has made the commitment to sign in England until next year. Becky Sauerbrunn’s returning from injury. We think she’ll be available to get minutes in this first game. Sophie Smith’s returning from injury; we expect her to be available for some minutes this weekend. AD and Bella both have medium- to long-term injuries; they will not be available for the Fall Series.”

I remember when I was 11 or 12, we had a few days of smoke, and it was such a novelty that on the first day, my friend’s mom said that upon waking up and smelling it she went around and checked every room to make sure the house wasn’t on fire.

I remember riding an Amtrak train out of Portland one year recently—can’t remember which—and seeing this crazy sunset where the clouds were layered behind the smoke in translucent layers like different-colored lighting gels, all orange and pink and purple. I was disturbed by how beautiful it was.

Something I am ashamed of is that when things aren’t so bad where I am—when we have a summer where the smoke never really reaches Portland, or the temperature never really spikes—I let myself believe in that moment that things aren’t so bad, generally speaking. I know this to be untrue, but at the same time as I know that, I let myself feel unworried. It’s a basic flaw in the human brain when it comes to functioning as part of a society; we simply don’t have the energy to experience problems as realistically dire unless they’re literally surrounding us, filling the air, blotting out the sun, chasing us out of our homes. Even then, once they go away, we relax. We have to do this. We don’t have the energy not to.

Here’s Emily Menges on how the Thorns are approaching the Fall Series, a set of games with no trophy:

“So we’ve had to talk about this a lot as a team, and everyone’s in all different places. So you have the players who are back from injury who are just raring to go and want to get back out there, get games in. You have some players who might need a little bit of a mental break and that kind of thing. But I think we’ve kind of understood as a team that we’re in such a unique situation, because we’re one of the only teams that has basically our entire team here… You rarely have the opportunity directly after a season to then reflect immediately, and kind of build off some of the things you wish were better during that season. You usually have a five-month offseason… We’ve looked back at a couple games in Utah, against Houston, against Carolina, and just been able to pick out those key moments on what we can build on, what we need to do better if we’re going to win the championship next year… We’re not wasting this time.”

Every time a fire season happens, I think, I can handle this, I’m used to it now, and every time there’s some new detail that reassures me, no, you can’t, and yes, the world really is ending. This year, it was the very palpable feeling that I and everyone I know in this state might need to evacuate and literally have nowhere to go. Each of the three cities in the Willamette Valley has its own personal fire, each of which was, until a couple days ago, barreling down the hills at us.

If you’re reading this right now from somewhere other than the west coast, I want to make sure you’re crystal clear about this: Portland, Salem, and Eugene, which have a combined population of about 3.5 million, all came within about thirty miles of getting engulfed in flames. The wind was so bad that firefighters weren’t even trying to contain the fires, just to move people out of harm’s way. Sooner or later, whether it’s here or in California or Washington, a fire is going to reach a major city, and many thousands of people will probably die.

Here’s Meghan Klingenberg on the smoke:

“Yeah, unfortunately that is kind of the state of the west coast right now in general, and it’s something that is really disappointing on a lot of levels, whether that’s a national level or a global level or a state level. Climate change is real, and we need to talk about it, and we need to make big strides in creating a world that we all want to live in, and a world that will continue to support life on this planet.”

This theoretical soccer game against OL Reign is at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. You can stream it on Twitch.

I’m still skeptical it’s happening, but even if it does, that won’t mean everything is fine. I can’t foresee a time when things will be fine. This is going to keep happening, and we’re going to keep putting up with it, because what else can we do? Next time, when the wind doesn’t shift at the last minute, where will we go?

Categories
Not Soccer Thorns

“I Have to Turn This Shame into Something Better”

Photo by Lucas Muller

Last weekend, Thorns defender Kelli Hubly took to Twitter to voice her support for Black lives and her opposition to racism.

She’s in the minority—most white NWSL players have not spoken up on their Black teammates’ behalf. I was curious to hear how Hubly got to this place. As much as we should all focus on listening to and elevating Black voices, I also think it’s crucial for white people to talk to each other about race, because at the end of the day, white supremacy is our problem. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity; the full audio version is available on our Patreon for supporters at the $10 level.

Katelyn Best: You said in that first tweet that you had been trying to find the right words to say. What was going through your head, and what was the thing that finally pushed you to say, “I’m going to say something even if it’s not perfect”?

Kelli Hubly: I have a lot of close people to me in my life who are Black, so I’ve had a lot of harder conversations where I’ve felt uncomfortable, they’ve felt uncomfortable, but afterwards it ended up being a great talk that I think has helped me grow, and they grow. Before Utah, I had a couple good talks, and then in Utah, I got that picture [from the tweet] and I was like, “I really want to post this.” And at that point, I know—back and forth people on Twitter, some people say, “I don’t want a white person saying stuff,” and some are like, “I would love white people to be saying stuff.” And my thought process was, I didn’t want to say something that drew too much attention to me versus the real issue, which is Black Lives Matter. So I was in a dilemma of what to say that would make it all about Black Lives Matter and not just like, an Instagram post where I look like a good person.

So I actually have a note in my phone of like, all different thoughts that came into my head, because this was over a month where I would be like, “okay, I want to say something, but it needs to be the right wording.” Finally I condensed it, and it kind of came after—our team does these talks. Like, we do them every week or so, usually on a recovery day, and we either read something, or watch something, and we come back and talk about it as a team, our coaches are there, everybody’s there, and everyone’s engaged. We’ll do a big team talk and then we’ll go into like, smaller groups. So we’ve been bringing more attention to just, everyone educating together and educating each other.

We just had one last Sunday, and it just like, really made me feel like I should post. We haven’t had games, we haven’t had really anything that we could be showing the world, like, this is how we feel. We had Utah and we kneeled, we wore the shirts, we were doing that. But we haven’t really done anything since. So it just felt like the right time for me to post, and I confronted one of my really good friends from home and asked her, “hey, how do you feel about this? Be honest with me. Do you think this is the right message getting across?” And she was like, “Kelli, I love this, this is amazing, I love seeing you use your platform.” So I ended up posting it and I got like, a lot of close friends of mine in the Black community who were like, “thank you so much, you don’t understand how much we love hearing a white person use their platform.” So it was just nice to kind of get my view on things out, because I have a lot bottled up and I haven’t known what to say or when to say it.

Take me back—you said that you guys had a bunch of conversations in Utah, and I know that some of that started even before Utah, but where were you at on these issues going into those conversations, and what did you learn?

So, yeah, we started these conversations before Utah, and I actually started the education process even before those conversations with my team. Like, watching the Meek Mill documentary or 13th before 13th kind of like, really blew up recently.

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, in a white area. So a lot of that was so new to me, and I had no idea. I was kind of just like, shocked that this was actually going on. And I felt a lot of shame for a very long time, because as the white person, I’m like, “how are we doing this to other people?” So yeah, a lot of shame, and I kind of just realized like, I have to turn this shame into something better and like, do better, and have conversations with people. When I went home after Utah, I had amazing conversations with my parents about it, because they also weren’t as educated, either. Like, defunding the police, what that truly means—it doesn’t [mean exactly what it sounds like], there’s deeper meaning to it. And just bringing attention to what actually has been going on, because I’ve been so sheltered.

The conversations have been great, because we’re hearing different stories from different players who have had different experiences, and we’ve been super open with each other, and no one’s really judging, everyone’s taking everybody in, and we’re growing together. I’m learning a lot. I’ve read two books about it, and it’s just very eye-opening, and it’s sad that it took me this long to know what truly has been going on.

If it’s taken me, who, I’m a pretty open person—[I’m] open to learning, I want to do what’s best, I want everything to be right in this world. After hearing and seeing, even in Utah, like, us kneeling,  people writing comments, these comments are unreal to me! My bubble is so like, “Black Lives Matter!” and then I go onto Instagram or Twitter and these comments are like, insane! I’m shocked that people are still thinking this way, and it’s like, what can we do to change these people’s minds, just get them to educate themselves a little bit? It’s just crazy.

Yeah, that’s interesting, and I think that I am kind of in a similar bubble to you in that everybody I know sort of is on the same page: kneeling is good, Black lives matter, we agree something needs to happen about police brutality, and then you see people on Twitter or whatever, disagreeing with that, and it’s hard to wrap your head around.

I get furious. I’m like, I need to say something! But I can’t just be replying to all of these people!

I don’t know how much of this you saw or heard about, but during the Challenge Cup there was a lot of discourse around the kneeling. And it’s striking to me that the Thorns are the only team that every single player and every single staff member kneeled that whole time, and—I don’t want to make it about a soccer team—but to me, that seems to say something about the conversations that you had within the team, that were maybe not happening in the same way on other teams. I’m just wondering if you have any insight as to why things might have gone different for [the Thorns].

Yeah, so we, in Utah, had talked about kneeling, and basically said like, how do we feel? Because we kind of wanted it to be us unified together. And basically, we’re a very close team, like I’m sure you’ve heard through people’s interviews. We’re very close and we all really trust each other, so we can have these hard conversations, and if someone felt uncomfortable, we can have that conversation.

So we kind of all decided together. Our coaching staff has been amazing, because they’re supportive of everything we’re doing, and through this whole process they’re learning so much, because a lot of them are foreign, so this is different because they’re not even from America. They’re learning about all of our history, and they’re trying to figure out, “ok, what are we doing, what do you need us to help with?”

So basically, we made a decision, like, if we’re all going to do this, we’re all going to do it, so we decided that we all were going to kneel, and we also decided after the first game, that we were all going to do it in a line together. I feel like we’ve just been really unified, and we have a really good culture, and it’s nice to see and be a part of.

I don’t want to pry into any conversations, but was there any reluctance, were there folks on the team who were like, “ah, I don’t know, I want to respect the anthem and respect the flag,” or whatever? Was there any of that kind of conversation happening?

Yes and no. Some people, it’s family, or just having people, veterans, in their family, so I think that was the hard part, but then when we talked about it, they knew this was the best thing for us to do and they felt good about it. They were able to, say, if their family member said something to them, they were able to have that conversation and express how they were feeling. It’s just been, like, a crazy time, and people from different parts of the country, it’s interesting to see different parents’ views versus like, my parents’ views. So for the most part, I think we were all pretty much on board and felt comfortable doing that.

I don’t know if you watch the WNBA, but they’ve done a series of pretty impressive, very unified, strong statements on these issues. It’s been striking to me how much more unified and I think, frankly, more effective they’ve been as a league, than the NWSL was during the Challenge Cup. I’d love to get your thoughts on this, but I think about the whiteness of the sport of soccer. Do you think that plays a role in how some of these conversations go down?

Definitely. We’ve actually talked about this in our last talk, last week. Basically, soccer’s a super white, privileged sport. It’s expensive to play growing up. You’re traveling, you need support, you need money, basically, to play soccer at a high level. So that’s why I think you see a lot more white soccer players.

But still, it doesn’t give us an excuse for not doing as much as the WNBA. I think what they’re doing is great, and I think looking at what they’re doing, I think it’s sparked a lot of conversations within our team to see what can we do with these games coming up. We’re on CBS our first game. What can we be doing? Can the announcers be giving out facts during our game? Could we like, think of something to put on pregame instead of when the anthem’s playing, we have something else playing, like players talking about stuff going on in the world? What can we be doing to do our part? Because they’re definitely doing way more than us, and it’s been effective. There’s a picture that I saw of the players in the shirts with the seven bullet holes, and I was like, “wow, that is really powerful.” So it like, makes us want to do more when it’s our turn to be on TV.

When you say that you want to continue to support your Black friends and your Black teammates, what does that mean to you? 

So, just knowing that they can come to me whenever there’s something going on, because I know times are hard and it’s frustrating, and it’s exhausting, and I just want to be able to support. Not pry, but just know that I’m always here. And to just pay attention more. I think everyone needs to pay attention more. And everyone just needs to be more kind! Like, I don’t know, the world is just crazy right now. It really bothers me, because I just see so much hate going on, and I’m just the total opposite. I have so much love to give to people.

So, support, educate, and be able to spread knowledge to people. When I went home, being able to talk to my parents more and give them a deeper meaning to things that I’m going through here. My parents are like, “oh, you’re so liberal! It must be Portland!” I don’t even think that way, I’m like, this is what’s right! This is, you know, human rights here. So just being able to support and be the best person I can be and do what I need to do to help. If it’s posting more, if it’s donating, whatever I need to be doing to make things better.

Do you have any highlights from the stuff that the team has been reading, or the stuff you guys have been listening to that you might recommend to people?

I think a great place to start is [Ijeoma Oluo’s] So You Want to Talk about Race, the book. That was the first book I read. A couple of my other teammates have read it because we were going to do a book club type thing, so a bunch of people got the book. So we’ve talked about it, and that’s a great place, I think, for people to start, because it touches on a lot of different subjects, and then basically if you want to know more about that subject then you know, like, this is what I want to zoom in on next time I read a book or something. And it gives facts, which you can’t, like—facts are facts.

It gives great stories, which are sad at times. Like she talks about being pulled over, and like, last year I got pulled over. And not once did it cross my mind that I would be scared. I’m just like, “oh my god, no, I’m caught!” My biggest thing is like, is my dad going to be mad at me? That’s what’s going through my head, but when I read this, I’m like, oh my god, people are scared for their life, where like, they’re tweeting that they got [pulled over]. Like that is so crazy to me, because that’s never once crossed my head. I’m so privileged. So that’s a great book.

13th is great because it’s just eye-opening. I really recommend the Meek Mill documentary [Free Meek], especially if you follow Meek Mill, he’s a rapper. So his story is unbelievable. I watched that and my jaw was just like, dropped. I think it’s six episodes and I watched them all in a day and I was just like, there’s no way this is real.

Then I read another book, it was a memoir of Mychal Denzel [Smith], The Invisible Man. It was interesting reading a memoir, and with voting all going on right now, it was really interesting, because in the book he talks about how when he was able to vote, him and his dad woke up at like five a.m. so that they could go wait in line for two or three hours, to make sure they could vote. And to go through like, those depths of waking up, waiting in line for two hours, to just be able to vote? I was shocked because I don’t think my parents have ever waited that long, I don’t think I would ever have to wait that long if I was at home voting—because I vote by mail-in ballot—but I was like, that’s crazy! I don’t know. It’s just really eye-opening and the memoir was really cool to read, because it’s in his shoes, and it’s just a totally different perspective, because it’s also a male perspective. It’s just been really interesting to read and just know more about.

I think the last thing I want to ask you is, how do you approach conversations with people who you feel are less aware of what’s going on, or a little bit less open to learning? Do you have a strategy that you’ve used?

Well, I haven’t really come across that many people that have not been open to it. I think, because yeah, even with my parents, if they weren’t sure about stuff, like, my mom didn’t know the term “defund the police.” And so she’s like, “Kelli, but like, we’re still going to need police officers!” And I’m like mom, that’s not the point! So like, bless her heart, she’s so cute, and then once I told her, she’s like, oh, that makes so much sense.

So I think not like, attacking people for not knowing, and not making fun of them or not thinking they’re a bad person because they didn’t know. It’s more if they’re willing to be open and learn, you just have to start wherever they’re at, and then build from there, but you have to do it in a growing way. You can’t be negative, because then they could feel bad about it, or go into a shell. We’ve talked about this on our team. And Gabby actually said, “I would give them the book So You Want to Talk about Race.” And I think that’s a great starting point for people. And she was like, there’s facts. You read those facts, like, you can’t really argue them. So I think that’s a great way to start, and then it kind of sparks the conversation.

It’s definitely hard, and you don’t want to start an argument over it. But you also need to have the conversation. So, yeah. It’s interesting, but I try to, you know, just be nice about it. Start slow and then get into it. Like I had a couple conversations with my parents, and then I told them to watch 13th. They didn’t understand like, the war on drugs and stuff. And I mean, I wouldn’t probably, either, if I didn’t watch this.

Categories
Not Soccer Soccer Timbers

Timbers Strike in Support of Black Lives

The Portland Timbers were supposed to play today, but they did something much more powerful instead.

It’s been a big day in American sports: earlier this afternoon, the Milwaukee Bucks decided they would not play their scheduled playoff game against the Orlando Magic, in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Sunday.

“The past four months have shed a light on the ongoing racial injustices facing our African-American community,” said Bucks guard Sterling Brown, reading a statement written by the team. “Citizens around the country have used their voices and platforms to speak out against these wrongdoings. Over the last few days in our home state of Wisconsin, we have seen the horrendous video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha, and the additional shooting of protesters. Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action, so our focus today cannot be on basketball.”

Later, the Lakers and Trailblazers joined them in striking, as did the Milwaukee Brewers and all six WNBA teams slated to play today.

Although the first MLS game of the night, between Orlando and Nashville, went on as planned, the other MLS teams scheduled to play tonight—including the Timbers—soon announced they, too, would refuse to play.

Today—four years to the day after Colin Kaepernick first knelt for the national anthem—Black athletes once again used their platforms to center violence against Black communities by police officers and white supremacists. Teams, leagues, and sponsors have been making statements saying they support the Black Lives Matter movement since June, but have done little—if anything—to back those words up with meaningful actions. These athletes are seizing control of their platform and refusing to continue entertaining people while people who look like them are murdered with impunity.

Don’t let this moment slip by. As we’ve seen all summer, athletes can bring attention to pressing social issues, but ultimately, dismantling white supremacy is our responsibility. As Jeremy Ebobisse wrote on Twitter today, “Empty, token mea culpas are a significant part of the problem.”

https://twitter.com/kingjebo/status/1298706984242278400?s=20

Financial donations, if you can afford it, are one way to help. Jacob Blake’s family has a fundraiser here. The Milwaukee Freedom Fund, which supports protesters in Wisconsin, also accepts donations. But ultimately, we need to push for drastic policy changes. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler and the City Council can all be reached here; drop them a line and tell them you demand meaningful action on police reform.

If you’re in Oregon and you’re not registered to vote, you can do that here. There’s a mayoral run-off election this November.

 

Categories
Soccer Thorns

Pack It up and Call It a Season

Photo by Lucas Muller

The soccer has come and gone for the Thorns, and for the rest of us, all that’s left to do is stare into the abyss and hope everything else might get slightly less bad at some point.

But first, let’s reflect on some of the big-picture takeaways from Portland’s Challenge Cup experience.

A War of Attrition

No summary of Portland’s Challenge Cup experience would be complete without noting the single overarching theme of the whole tournament, for all the teams involved, which is that the whole thing was very exhausting. The Thorns started the tournament without AD Franch and Sophia Smith, immediately lost Becky Sauerbrunn, and hung on to Lindsey Horan until she sat down in a defeated-looking heap ten minutes after the half in the quarterfinal. I do not know how Raquel Rodríguez or the 37-year-old Christine Sinclair were still ambulatory by the end of the tournament.

More striking than the impact on any particular player, though, was how fatigue shaped outcomes for Portland twice: first when they took down a North Carolina team that had started basically the same lineup throughout the preliminary round, and again when they limped out of that game and into their semifinal against Houston. Keeping up with even a tired Courage side is an extraordinary athletic feat, and the Thorns paid for it.

Diamonds Are(n’t) Forever

Portland played a new formation in this tournament, a 4-4-2 diamond. This made sense for the players they had available: with Tobin Heath sitting out and Midge Purce and Hayley Raso long gone, the Thorns were left with no real wide attacking threats. They did, however, have an excess of quality central midfielders of various shapes and sizes: Horan and Sinclair, of course, plus Rodríguez, Angela Salem, Celeste Boureille, Gabby Seiler, and Emily Ogle.

What was striking about this particular diamond was where the width came from—namely, in large part, from Rodríguez and Horan. In the team’s first outing against North Carolina, that was largely visible as both of them provided defensive muscle out wide, putting early pressure on runs by Jaelene Daniels or Lynn Williams to ease some of the burden off Portland’s outside backs.

That system is an interesting interpretation of what’s usually thought of as quite a narrow formation, and it went a long way toward containing the Courage; what looked weirder was when Horan and Rodríguez attacked from wide areas. The intent here seems to be to keep Sinclair (mostly) central and have her connect play both into the box and to whoever’s out wide, whether that’s Horan, Rodríguez, or one of the forwards. The problem is that lacking both players like Heath or Raso, who can stretch defenses out of shape and beat wide defenders one on one, and a reliable target striker, teams were able to focus their pressure on Sinclair and force her into sideways passes. What the Thorns were left with was a lot of very hopeful crosses and no one to put on the end of them.

Of course, attacking from out wide paid off one very important time, when Rodríguez sent a pass under Denise O’Sullivan to Morgan Weaver, who bodied past her mark to score the go-ahead goal. This is to say the system kind of worked. You could see how it was supposed to work in that moment. But they just couldn’t generate enough chances this way. Weaver, who looks extremely promising but still raw, can’t reliably beat defenders at this level; more important, it’s not the best use of Horan, Rodríguez, or especially Sinclair, who looked stranded a lot of the time.

In short, this was an interesting experiment while it lasted, and it helped the team find some notable success against North Carolina, but it would be hard to justify for a Thorns roster that included Heath, Sophia Smith, and one or more Rumored International Forwards.

Photo by Lucas Muller
Some Success Stories

The pandemic has meant that the Thorns, like several other NWSL teams, never got the chance to finish building their roster—after having purged half of last year’s starting lineup, no less. Kadidiatou Diani, rumored to be headed to Portland for $445,000 a year, would (assuming she could have adapted to the physicality and competitiveness of the NWSL) have provided exactly the kind of creativity out wide the Thorns are currently lacking. Making matters worse, Ellie Carpenter, another key piece both defensively and going forward—and once thought to be the only Aussie who would survive the exodus—left shortly before the tournament.

On the other hand, the players Portland did acquire are all excellent additions. Rodríguez, arguably the most important piece, is the midfield partner to Horan—a second box-to-box player with the right combination of creativity, work rate, and defensive grit—that Parsons has been looking for since the 2017 season ended. Weaver is physically strong enough to body defenders and gutsy enough to take them on the dribble; with a little more experience under her belt, she looks like she could turn into the mythical goal-scoring forward Portland has lacked for years.

But the team made the most progress on the defensive side. Surprisingly for a team that picked up Becky Sauerbrunn in the offseason, that progress doesn’t just boil down to new signings. Christen Westphal was excellent, but the revelation this tournament was Kelli Hubly, who impressed at right back in the opener, then stepped up to fill the vacancy left by the injured Sauerbrunn centrally. She saved the Thorns more than once, and her willingness to step to opposing forwards made her a great partner for the more conservative Emily Menges. Finally, sitting deep in midfield, the team has an absolute bulldog in Salem, who’s been sidelined by injury for a good chunk of her time with the Thorns. All in all, the roster still looks incomplete, but it’s deeper than it looked heading into the tournament.

“The Culture”

If you ask anyone on the team, they’ll likely say their biggest achievement this month was a return to the Thorns’ vaunted team culture, something both the players and Parsons say had slipped by the end of 2019. For all the talent on any given Thorns roster, this is an attitude-first coaching staff, and whether or not players have a certain personality and work ethic often guides both who gets signed and who gets traded away.

Parsons’ focus on building a team-first, relentlessly hard-working culture, and the unexpected results it sometimes produces, is underappreciated—at least outside Portland. This is a team that often excels when the odds are stacked against them, as they did during the World Cup last year, or during the Olympics in 2016. Even when they won the championship in 2017, they were using a (different) formation they had adopted to make up for Heath’s absence earlier that season, and they gritted and ground and, frankly, punched their way past the top team in the league.

They couldn’t figure out how to win that way this time around; the basic concept was a little too makeshift and the bench a little too shallow as the tournament wore on and injuries took out player after player. But if a strong team culture is the foundational variable Parsons and his players say it is, this is a significant step in the right direction.

The state of the culture is basically something we have to take the team’s word for, especially at a moment when no one is allowed to even speak to them in person. But that, plus an organized defense, have been the foundation for Portland’s success in the past, and if they stay focused on those two things, they’re in good shape looking toward 2021.

Photo by Lucas Muller
And Beyond

That’s the good news. The other news is that a wholesale rebuild is still looming for the Thorns, probably sooner rather than later. They have to expect to take some losses with two expansion teams entering, and then, on some unknown date, comes the real inevitable truth: Christine Sinclair cannot play professional soccer forever. It’s said that mileage matters more than years, so this truncated “season” may wind up extending her career, but she’s nonetheless nearing 40.

At that point, it’s anyone’s guess what direction this team goes in. They’ve built their midfield around Sinclair and Horan for the last five years, and one thing that became clear in Utah is that while Sinclair is still quality, she also needs certain types of players around her to succeed. When she departs, the club changes completely, the way things do when realities so long-lasting they feel like laws of physics change. The only certainty seems to be that the Thorns become, fully, Horan’s club. Beyond that? We’ll have to wait and see.

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Soccer Thorns

It’s Just Emilies All the Way Down

"Mengi" — Photo by Matthew Wolfe. Edited by Leo Baudhuin
emily armstrong (gk)

Was a non-roster invitee for the Thorns ahead of 2017. Never appeared for Portland, but ended up playing ten games in Norway that same year. According to Soccerway, is now affiliated with a second-tier club in Sweden (joined by a teammate of the name Emilie Brandt).

Emily kruger (gk)

Stuck around for two seasons as Portland’s third-string keeper in the pre-Bella Bixby days. Was called up as an amateur player for a bit in 2016—presenting us with the never-realized possibility of having an Emily in goal behind an Emily center back pairing—but didn’t get to take the field for the Thorns. Allegedly went to Cal, claimed the number 19 jersey in Portland, and is a Scorpio, but otherwise her identity is something of a mystery.

Emily Menges (D)

The Thorns’ longest-tenured center back. Drafted out of Georgetown in the third round in 2014, making her arguably the best value ever to emerge from the NWSL College Draft. Had a legendary block against Jess McDonald late in the 2017 championship. Coined the phrase “let’s make a constellation.”

Emily Sonnett (D)

The wildest ball of lightning to ever pull on a Thorns jersey. The number one overall pick in the 2016 draft. Incredible one moment, inexplicable the next, and an absolute content machine, on and off the field. The inaugural NWSL Most Online Player; hexed by Amy Rodriguez late in the 2019 season.

Emilee O’Neil (MF/D)

Made four appearances for the Thorns in 2013 after starting as a trialist. A 2004 Stanford graduate who stepped away from the game before joining the Bay Area Breeze of the now-defunct USL W-League. The rest is lost to history.

Emily Dickinson (MF)

The legendary poet out of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Refused to play if the Thorns weren’t in their white kits. After a playoff loss in the 1861 season, she was asked a generic question about the emotions in the locker room, and replied:

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne’er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need.

 

Not one of all the purple Host

Who took the Flag today

Can tell the definition

So clear of victory

 

As he defeated – dying –

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

emily ogle (mf)

Selected 24th overall as Portland’s only pick in the 2019 NWSL College Draft, the clear result of a need to maintain a plurality of Emilies in anticipation of losing Sonnett. Still young, usually strong on the ball, yet to be defined.

Emily Brönte (MF)

Unlike her sister Charlotte, a prolific goalscorer for England and the Chicago Red Stars, Brönte was a hard-working No. 6—a real shit-kicker of a midfielder. Some have called her a limited player, but what she did—namely, a calculated professional foul to stop a developing attack in its tracks—she did well. Both feared and respected by opposing midfields.

Emilie Zebulon (FW)

Portland’s first Martian-born player. A discovery player acquired in 2132 after she failed to impress for Paris Saint-Germain and had been playing in the Moon League, a gimmicky non-FIFA-sanctioned competition played on a giant field with goals that hovered several dozen feet off the ground. A manager who believed in her and a more constructive training environment did wonders, and she went on to score a team-leading 21 goals in 32 games in her first season.

emily rowie (fw)

Joined the Thorns midway through the 2024 season after completing a psychology degree at the University of Minnesota. Was fourth all-time in Gophers goals scored (38) and tied for seventh with assists (25), despite playing fullback for most of her sophomore year. Effective as a No. 9, but thrives as a Hayley Raso-esque wide forward.

3M1-lY (FW)

After waiting decades for an effective goal-scoring center forward to materialize, the 2079 Thorns decided to take advantage of the league’s new roster rule expanding the number of android player slots. The prototype, 3M1-LX, had played in preseason several seasons earlier but tended to have finishing problems; even when the service from Lindsey Horan 2 (a clone of her namesake) was perfect, it tended to sky the ball over the net. Training its ball trajectory algorithm on several billion additional data points didn’t work. Oddly, the turning point came when it was fed a dataset of human knock-knock jokes—all it needed, it seems, was to feel like part of the team.

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Soccer Thorns

Just the Beginning for Bella Bixby

Photo by Bryan Byerly/ISI Photos
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Two Takeaways from the Thorns’ 1–1 Draw Against Washington

Photo by Bryan Byerly/ISI Photos

The Thorns settled for a 1–1 draw tonight against the Washington Spirit, with Lindsey Horan scoring a diving header off a free kick in the 69th minute, and conceding one, also on a set piece, a few minutes later. Let’s dig into what happened:

1. The Thorns are wide now

With each game in this tournament, we’ve seen a slightly different facet of the Thorns’ shiny new diamond midfield. Against North Carolina, we saw the team’s dual No. 8s, Lindsey Horan and Rocky Rodríguez, put wide defensive pressure on the opposing outside backs and No. 10s. On the offensive side, the duo succeeded in breaking the Courage’s press in the center of the field. In this game, we saw Horan and Rodríguez both spend a lot of time attacking in wide areas, with the bulk of Portland’s chances coming on crosses, especially in the first half.

A diamond midfield is often thought of as quite narrow, but not the way the Thorns are playing. Portland attempted an almost Courage-like 19 crosses, and players all up and down the field—from Meghan Klingenberg and Christen Westphal in the back, to Rodríguez and Horan, to Morgan Weaver up top—contributed in that area. Unfortunately, nobody managed to put any of those in the net—though a few came close.

The attack was less focused down the wings in the second half, with Horan finding a few penetrating passes toward Tyler Lussi. According to Mark Parsons, though, that wasn’t by design. “I think the desperateness to score meant that we were gravitating centrally,” he said after the game. “Width is key, and we’re going to get width from multiple areas. You can see from our forwards and also our midfield, and also fullbacks when the shape allows, and the buildup allows the fullbacks to push on. So it wasn’t a switch, unfortunately.”

The question here—and for once, despite my perennial (and fact-based) insistence that the Thorns don’t actually struggle to score goals, I think it’s a fair one—is who’s going to get on the end of those crosses. Horan, obviously, is an extremely dangerous header of the ball. Other than her, of the current healthy players, Lussi seems best suited to that role, but she seems to still be finding her way into this tournament. On the other hand, Portland did find 10 shots from inside the box, even if only four of them were on frame.

2. Lindsey Horan: too good?

Before the tournament started, I asked whether Horan (tonight’s Budweiser Woman of the Match) is such a dominant player that she ends up posing a problem when it comes to squad-building. At the time, I was assuming the Thorns would be using a three-woman midfield as they generally have the past few years; Rodríguez’s strong showing, along with the backing of a true No. 6 in Angela Salem, have proven that specific concern wrong.

However, I still think there’s a potential issue here. Horan is so good, in so many areas of the field, that Portland would be foolish not to let her do as much as possible. She’s been ridiculous in this tournament, the most impactful single player in any of the games she’s played. She disrupts, sets play in motion, and then moves all the way up the field with it, often ending up taking the eventual shot (or, in this game, cross). In tonight’s match, she produced the majority of the chances, took the most touches, conceded the most fouls, and scored Portland’s lone goal.

It’s been a surprise to me to see both her and Christine Sinclair—with whom there’s a similar issue, if not quite to the same extent—starting every game and playing the majority of the available minutes. Parsons says she’s in the best shape of her life and can handle this week; the Thorns also now have a full, luxurious week of no games. Sinclair, meanwhile, is famously fastidious in her recovery protocol. Regardless, I still wonder why these two players started every game, especially given the amount of squad rotation the team has otherwise undergone from day to day.

I don’t have anything particularly smart to say here, but it reminds me of this: I used to play on a rec-league softball team with a friend who was a ludicrously gifted athlete. He nominally played shortstop, but because our roster tended to be split 50-50 between what I’ll call “real athletes” and “the others,” he inevitably ended up covering half the infield. He’d catch a fly ball, tag a runner, and then sprint 40 feet to ever-so-gently toss the ball underhanded to one of the lesser mortals on the team. On top of that, his movements were graceful and beautiful to watch. When he played, we could win. When he didn’t? Things… were harder.

I don’t think winning is the Thorns’ priority in this tournament, at least not at this stage; I think getting everybody minutes and figuring out how the team functions is the point. What I wonder is whether Horan is so central to the team, because she does so much, that playing without her would be a pointless exercise. I also wonder if, in the long term, relying that much on a single talismanic player might make things harder.

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Soccer Thorns

Kelli Hubly Proved Me Wrong

Photo by Kris Lattimore

In the 23rd minute of Portland’s tournament-opening loss to North Carolina, something amazing happened. It started with Steph Labbé sending an arcing pass to Debinha in the midfield. As Debinha tried to settle the bouncing ball onto the turf, Kelli Hubly—the second sidekick in the sadly defunct Midge Purce-led dance team, she of the rolled-up shorts—charged in, got her body between the ball and her opponent, and, under pressure, completed a flailing left-footed pass to Lindsey Horan.

I have watched this sequence about eight times, both in the interest of describing it accurately above, and because I love it. I find the whole thing deeply relatable.

I’ve written a lot of words about people like Horan and Christine Sinclair and Tobin Heath over the last few years, because I like watching them play. When I get the chance, I also enjoy talking to them and hearing their coaches and teammates talk about them. But Horan and Sinclair and Heath are not the same as me.

At the same time as them being different and better than me is a major reason I like watching them, sometimes it starts to feel ridiculous writing about these people and their feats. They are basically beyond my comprehension. Their brains have a fundamentally different kind of connection to their bodies than mine does, and their bodies are also quite a bit stronger and better. There’s an inherent absurdity to me not just criticizing, but making any observations at all, about someone like Lindsey Horan. It’s like congratulating a cheetah for being fast.

Hubly, though—we are at least recognizably the same species. She’s not a hyper-competitive monster like everyone at the highest level of the sport. She’s clearly talented, to have gotten this far, but she’s talented in the way regular human beings are. She made the team, and has stayed on it, by dint of honest hard work. You get the feeling watching her that she is always trying very hard.

I have this image seared into my head which I’m not even sure is real—I’ve asked our photographers and none of them remember having captured it—of Hubly having just messed something up, either given away a goal or conceded a penalty. I believe it’s 2018, because I think she’s wearing that godawful white kit with the tire tracks on it, but I might just be remembering the Thorns kit I most associate with disappointment. She may or may not be sitting on the ground. She looks absolutely shellshocked, eyes wide, jaw tense, and I’m projecting here, but to me this is the face of someone not just deeply embarrassed about what’s just happened, but also in mortal fear of the potential longer-term personal consequences.

Thinking about that image, I can feel what that’s like viscerally in my body. I don’t think many of us can really empathize with what it’s like to do something like win a World Cup. I imagine I’d feel very happy! But I can’t picture it. Feeling like you’ve just let everyone around you down and that you might also lose your job because of it, though? That I can understand.

Another thing I can understand is the much smaller-scale victory Hubly had on Saturday. She wasn’t perfect. Lynn Williams, being Lynn Williams, burned her a few times. She let some crosses in. But she had also very clearly heard and understood her instructions for the game. She judiciously applied pressure in the areas it was needed, didn’t bite when Crystal Dunn or Jaelene Daniels tried to dribble around her, sensibly cleared the ball a number of times.

In part, as Mark Parsons pointed out in a Zoom call a few days ago, she was finally playing a role she’s actually suited to, rather than being tossed in as the third center back behind Meghan Klingenberg. This is not the story of a breakout moment, about how Hubly is good enough to replace Ellie Carpenter, about how she’s going to start for the Thorns going forward. She’s always going to be a serviceable NWSL player. But you know what? That’s fucking hard. Playing multiple seasons as the fifth or sixth defender on the depth chart and still showing up to work every day with a smile on your face, ready to keep doing your best—that takes a level of tenacity I’m not sure I can relate to. We don’t appreciate what that takes enough.

When those smaller-scale victories come, for Hubly or any of the other mortals in this league, celebrate them. We’re all out here doing the best we can.

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Soccer Thorns

Don’t Let Anyone Tell You This Doesn’t Mean Something

Photo by Rob Gray, ISI

There was a tweet today, from a certain talking head/professional troll in the soccer space, about how we’ve reached the point—four years after Colin Kaepernick lost his job for declaring his life mattered as much as those of his white teammates, four years after US Soccer prohibited its players from publicly standing with him—where athletes find it hard not to kneel for the anthem.

It’s an incredibly inane, annoying take, engineered to provoke outrage, and that’s why I’m not linking to it here. Still, I think it expresses a line of reasoning that appeals to broad segments of white America, and that line of reasoning is worth unpacking.

To get the obvious out of the way: being wrong about this issue, or any human rights issue, is not brave, merely evil.

To dig down a little further: if you were an alien just finding out about human customs, seeing the photo at the top of this article with no further context, you probably would come to the conclusion that human beings kneel on one knee before sporting events, and that not doing so is a breech of custom that takes a certain amount of courage. This is how our species is wired, for the most part; it’s difficult for us to do things other than what people around us are doing.

But that conclusion willfully erases context. These players didn’t all show up to the stadium and put on their Black Lives Matter shirts because they saw everyone else was wearing them; nobody scrambled to take a knee when the anthem started to avoid looking out of place. This was a concerted, intentional effort by players on both teams—across the whole league, even. They had talked about this. They had listened to each other. This was not an easy decision.

Conversations within teams didn’t all start right away. Simone Charley talked to The Equalizer about how hard it was, in the days after George Floyd’s murder, showing up to training and deciding to act like soccer mattered, and seeing how easily that decision came to her white teammates.

In Portland, it took a few days for those conversations to start—prompted by both Black and white players, but in particular, according to Sophia Smith, by AD Franch—and nobody should take for granted that they started at all. They happened because Black women on these teams did the work of talking to their white teammates about experiences those same teammates haven’t always been willing to listen to. This sport is as white as it’s ever been, and many of the players who kneeled today come from backgrounds that haven’t forced them to ever think critically about racism—that have, in fact, actively discouraged it.

So while it’s true there’s been a massive, sudden shift in public opinion over the last month on the acceptability of publicly opposing racism, don’t think for a second that this show of support for Black lives was a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t the brands that brought us here. It was Black players fighting for their lives and finally being heard by their teammates.

Furthermore, there are stark facts here, facts that will be recorded in history: these players took their stance in an empty stadium, but that empty stadium was on broadcast television. As the first American sports league to return to play. That’s the biggest platform women’s club soccer has ever been on.

The players knew what this platform meant. It meant they were opening themselves up to criticism that no doubt would also have been directed at male athletes doing the same thing, but which, no doubt, will be more vicious thanks to their gender. Have things changed since 2016, when Crystal Dunn didn’t kneel because she was afraid—for good reason—USSF might “rip up her contract“? Of course. But you’d have to be an alien to sincerely believe there won’t be backlash.

But this is what can’t get lost in the noise: the players also knew how significant the moment was, and they knew they had to take it, and use it to say something. It’s okay for us to be proud of that.

The danger is in letting this gesture exist as a mere gesture, and in deciding once the tournament is over that we’ve all done enough. It’s great that we’ve finally reached the point in this league where players can express solidarity against racism and police violence without fearing for their jobs. Now it’s on us, at home, to commit to standing with them and doing the actual work of putting an end to those things.

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Soccer Thorns

Sophia Smith’s Long, Winding Road to Utah

Photo by ISI Photos
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