Katelyn Best – Page 6 – Rose City Review

This website is ostensibly about soccer, and I’ve been trying for a few days to write something about soccer, both for my own satisfaction and to soothe people’s worries that the new blog with the pleasant pink background and the bundle of roses for a logo will only be about the Portland Timbers.

I diligently logged on and spent some time watching Raquel Rodriguez footage. I took a few notes. I think she’s good! She seems like she could fill the No. 6 role the Thorns were hoping Andressinha would be able to play. Is that what’s actually going to happen? I have no idea. That’s about where my current thoughts end.

When it comes to writing about soccer itself, I have a pretty big mental block right now. There are too many sources of stress bouncing around in my brain, bumping into each other, amplifying each other. A lot of them are no doubt familiar to you, the reader, if you’ve been a conscious participant in the world at large over the last month. Others have to do with the specific niche this site lives in, and others still belong to me, personally.

There has been a lot of Discourse about who is and isn’t reporting on soccer in this city in recent weeks. I have plenty of opinions about that discourse, which I won’t get into here.

What I will say is that this will be my fifth year covering the Thorns, and none of those years has been quite the same, but what’s distinctly new this year is that I have a job with a schedule typical enough of a normal American office job that I won’t be able to go to trainings during the week to actually report on the team. I don’t know yet how I’m going to navigate that. I’m going to have to use postgame opportunities a lot more judiciously, but in part, I’m simply going to have to accept that I will know less.

That stresses me out, um, a lot? It stresses me out that preseason training started this week and I couldn’t be there, and it stresses me out looking into the future and trying to imagine myself working my way out of this mental block using a very different process from what I’m used to.

No one is actually yelling at me, but I do have a feeling like people are yelling at me. There’s a lot of yelling going on in general, and I also think a lot of people are looking around desperately searching for Thorns content and getting pretty upset at its nonexistence. There’s only so much I can do about that. There’s only one of me, and while I have two wonderful collaborators here in the Thorns Zone, we all either work or go to school.

We will endeavor to make our coverage as even as possible between the two teams here at the Review, but the fact is, gazing out over the whole incredibly sparse soccer media landscape, the Timbers are going to get more coverage. That’s just how things are right now. And yes, ultimately, that’s because of sexism, which I don’t like any more than you do.

The fact is, if no publication is willing to pay for a full-time soccer writer, nobody is going to be happy with how much soccer coverage there is, period. We’re going to do our best. I’m going to do my personal best. Nonetheless, I’m simply not a beat reporter; I edit corporate training documents and write about soccer as a hobby.

Another fact is that with the state of things, we don’t even really know how much soccer is going to get played, or when, or in front of whom.

This moment in time presents a similar challenge to all of us, to focus on what we can control and learn to let the rest go. I don’t touch my face and I wash my hands as soon as I get home; I will go to the preseason media day next week, assuming it happens, and take advantage of whatever other opportunities for reporting continue to exist for me, and write about my thoughts and feelings in this space. We’ve got to keep putting one foot in front of the other, y’all. While we’re at it, let’s try not to yell at each other.

Has everyone else been feeling jittery recently?

There’s a lot of stressful stuff going on in the world at large right now. Why, then, did we add to our collective stress by having a mass panic last week about whether Becky Sauerbrunn was actually coming to the Thorns? Why conjure up any more visions of people in smoke-filled rooms making strategic phone calls than are strictly and absolutely necessary? Why, especially, do this when it comes to what is actually a totally normal and logical trade that benefits everyone involved?

It’s done. Becky Sauerbrunn will play in red, for the price of $100,000 in allocation money and one (1) Elizabeth Ball.

Sauerbrunn is such an obviously good acquisition for Portland that it’s hard to say much about it. She’s a very good player who everyone likes, and she plays at a position where the Thorns badly needed to improve. To anyone who hasn’t watched the Thorns extensively over the last two years, it might look less good for Utah—but they’re getting a gritty young defender who improved dramatically in her time in Portland and looks to still have quite a bit of upside. Plus, you know, $100,000.

Put it that way, and it almost—almost—looks like the Thorns got the short end of the stick here. As good as Sauerbrunn is, as central as she has been to the national team since what feels like the dawn of time, she’s slowed down in recent years, and you have to imagine she’s closing in on the tail end of her career. It looks, in short, like Utah is looking to build something, while Portland is looking for results right now, this season, at the possible cost of a roster that can take the club into its inevitable next era.

But, without speculating here about what kind of leverage Sauerbrunn may or may not have held over her former club to push this trade along, it seems probable that this is a USWNT-allocated player who will be all but untouchable in whatever expansion drafts are on the horizon. At age 34 and finally playing in the city she calls home, what expansion team would be able to lure her over for the last few years of her career? (I’d also ask what expansion team would want a 34-year-old center back, but the concept of having a star USWNT player makes teams do some wild stuff in this league.)

With not just expansion but the retirement of a certain Canadian legend looming on the horizon, the Thorns will have to do a full-on rebuild sometime in the next five years or so. Now is not the moment for that; now is the moment for them to grab what they can, nail down anything the wind could blow away, and hang on for the coming storm. From that angle, Sauerbrunn couldn’t possibly be a more perfect acquisition for Portland.

With all that said, there’s always another dimension to these things, the dimension of Feelings, which is the one I tend to dwell in. And well, it makes you feel good, doesn’t it? It’s nice to think about Becky Sauerbrunn playing for the Thorns.

To try to polish that up a little: there’s a certain symbolism to Sauerbrunn winding up in Portland. She’s the iconic player, and perhaps the best player, of the early years of the NWSL, while the Thorns have always been and remain the league’s flagship franchise. Sauerbrunn in Portland represents what everyone wanted Alex Morgan in Portland to represent—we just had the facts wrong when it came to what Morgan wanted out of the deal.

When I call Sauerbrunn iconic, I mean a few things. First, in the league’s first three seasons, the Thorns may have been setting the bar for what was possible off the field, but arguably, it was Sauerbrunn’s club, FC Kansas City, that defined the league on the field. They weren’t always the best team—2014 was also the year Americans learned who Kim Little was—but they were always in the playoffs, and they won the championship twice. In launching Vlatko Andonovski’s career in women’s soccer, they showed (in a way that wouldn’t quite be visible until a few years later) that success in this league means something.

And of course, Sauerbrunn herself is a player who made a name for herself at the club level, well before women’s clubs in this country were thought of as a viable path for name-making. Sauerbrunn in Portland is a thing that, for how surreal it’s no doubt going to look at first, simultaneously somehow feels right and true. She will be playing, after all, alongside fellow sleeve-hater Emily Menges. Tell me this wasn’t preordained.