The Thorns earned their third victory of the Challenge Cup last night, a 2–0 win over OL Reign, which clinched their spot in the championship on May 8. A beautiful free kick by Lindsey Horan in the 17th minute and a weird chaos goal by Simone Charley early in the second half were the difference between the two teams. Here are a few of my takeaways from the match:
1. “I hope [my rose] never dies” -Crystal Alyssia Dunn Soubrier
Crystal Dunn made her long-awaited Thorns debut last night, and as promised, she’s getting a lot of freedom to roam and create. On paper, she slotted in at the No. 8 in the midfield diamond, but she played that role a little differently from how Rocky Rodríguez has been handling it. She was very much still in a box-to-box role, but tended to sit higher up the field in the attack, often swapping places with Christine Sinclair as she found space between the Reign’s lines.
We’ve been misled a little—Merritt Paulson said at least once Dunn would be playing at forward—but I love her in this position, especially since it lets both Sophia Smith and Simone Charley fit in the lineup. Mark Parsons’s attitude toward this role seems not unlike how he outlined Tobin Heath’s job; in short, get her the ball in possession and let her figure it out.
At times, Dunn, Smith, and Horan looked to not quite be on the same page as each other and the rest of the team, but that’s understandable given how little training time they’ve gotten since the international window ended.
2. The Reign didn’t really show up
The team formerly known as the Seattle Reign put up a pretty lackluster opposition last night. For a lot of the first half, they struggled to defend in an organized way, often giving the Thorns too much time and space, not choosing the right moments to press, and leaving players unmarked and passing lanes open. I am struck by this image of all of Becky Sauerbrunn’s passes, which shows how content the Reign were to let her make one particular entry pass into the final third over and over:
When the Reign did apply pressure, they often focused on Lindsey Horan, and they did succeed in turning her back towards her defense a number of times. At other moments, though, she either broke through the pressure or combined with Sinclair or Dunn to keep moving the ball forward. On top of those players’ individual skill, Portland often had an overload in the midfield, with Natalia Kuikka and Meghan Klingenberg pushing forward and Smith dropping back.
The Thorns also found a number of chances on good old-fashioned balls over the top, as Sauerbrunn and Kelli Hubly were both given as much time as they wanted throughout the first half. Again, sometimes that didn’t matter—Hubly hit a few that were pretty aimless—but with Charley’s speed and dribbling ability up top, that route is a real threat for the Thorns.
The Reign switched on more in the second half, especially once Jess Fishlock and Megan Rapinoe came on. Those two players both looked to have some ideas going forward, and Fishlock in particular (no surprises here) provided defensive grit the midfield had mostly lacked. Nevertheless, Tacoma’s back line kept making weird errors, and their offense was unlucky on the handful of chances they put together.
3. Um?
Sort of a subsection to the last one: I don’t want to take anything away from Lindsey Horan’s free kick, which was gorgeous, but it’s not hard to see what’s about to happen here. I’m not sure why the Reign were set up like this:
4. Some highlights from the stats
Like they did against Kansas City, Portland significantly out-passed the Reign, with 79.5% accuracy at full time against their opponents’ 71.3%. Six Thorns starters completed at least 80% of their passes, led by Kuikka at 86.2%.
Charley had a record-breaking night:
Simone Charley subbed out after 68 minutes. Finishes the match with 1 goal 6 shots on target (most by any NWSL player since 2019, most by Thorns player in Opta era 2017-) 9 shots (most by a Thorn since 2019)#BAONPDX
The Thorns played the Chicago Red Stars to a 1–0 win in Bridgeview, Illinois last night; Morgan Weaver, fresh off a cleared red card that probably should’ve only been downgraded to a yellow, scored the lone goal of the match off Portland’s only shot on target.
About 30 minutes into the game, my roommate came into my room and asked who I thought would win. I said Portland, 1–0, and that it was going to be an otherwise unexciting game. For the most part, I was right.
1. We did watch a first half of soccer
I was pleasantly surprised by how the Thorns played for most of last Friday’s match. They looked sharp and energized and direct and not like a team playing their first game since October; having Riveters in the stands for the first time in over a year probably helped. Which made last night’s performance—full of sloppy passes and a lack of offensive… anything in the first half—stand out a little more than it would have as the second game in any other season.
After the match, Kelli Hubly said the field was bumpy and made the Thorns “a little bit weary of [our] passes and our touches.”
Portland ended the first half with a 64.2% passing accuracy, which, in my mind, sums up the overarching feeling of those 45 minutes pretty well.
2. Marissa Everett-Tyler Lussi
“Second half, we really went out there and proved to everyone that we had the energy and we were going to win this game,” Weaver said, and Tyler Lussi’s 52nd minute shot was the first hint of just that.
On its own, it was a great run from Lussi. She did well to make the most of her opportunity and hit a left-footed shot. Red Stars goalkeeper Cassie Miller was caught watching as the chance—unfortunately for Lussi and fortunately for Miller—deflected off the crossbar.
But I also want us to take a second to sit back, relax, and (re)watch this absolutely wild curled ball in from Marissa Everett to set up Lussi’s strike:
I’m not sure that I took all that much away from watching this game live, aside from the aforementioned points. Not that the rest of the match was uninteresting: the Meghan Klingenberg as a No. 8 experiment continued, we got to see Emily Menges take the field for the first time this year, and Meaghan Nally made her Thorns debut (at forward!).
But—while I don’t know that I have anything to say beyond what Katelyn’s already written on her—the 20 minutes we saw of Natalia Kuikka at right back were incredibly fun, and I’m excited to watch her play out wide as Portland’s defense returns to full strength.
On Friday night, the Portland Thorns posted a video of the incident between Morgan Weaver and Kristen Edmonds with the words “Morgan Weaver is innocent.” Both fans and media called them out, pointing to the fact that framing a white woman as “innocent” in an on-field altercation with a Black woman perpetuates racist stereotypes that frame Black women as aggressors and white women pure and incapable of harm.
The Thorns organization also responded to a tweet from Sarah Gorden, who criticized the initial tweet, saying “the intent of [their] post had an unintended impact.” That’s an acknowledgement that the post caused harm—to whom or how isn’t made clear—but nothing more.
The club deleted the initial post this morning, but has yet to apologize for the language it used.
The intent of the tweet may have been simply to support Weaver as a Thorns player and to dispute the official’s decision, but it became clear shortly after it was posted that the choice of words had an unintended but very real impact on Black players and fans. Language matters, and good intentions don’t absolve us of responsibility.
The Rose City Review is calling on the Thorns organization to issue an apology for the language they used in Friday night’s tweet. Deleting a post after five days of fan pushback—and dismissing those who called it racist during that time—is not good enough. Last summer, when conversations about race in America were in full force, the club repeatedly expressed its commitment to racial justice. The first part of such a commitment always has to be listening to and believing those harmed by racism.
We stand with the Black players, fans, and media of the NWSL and will always strive to hold ourselves accountable to this same standard.
The Thorns kicked off their 2021 Challenge Cup last night with a 2–1 win against the nameless team from Kansas City, thanks to goals by Rocky Rodríguez and Tyler Lussi. What was mostly a routine and successful first game by a Portland team missing a number of players to international duty and injury turned sour toward the end. Danielle Chesky issued a record-setting four red cards, one to Mark Parsons, and a mass scuffle broke out between the two teams. Here are a few of my thoughts:
1. Things started well and were mostly normal
Up until the last three minutes of this game (more on that later), it really felt like the story was going to be that this was a solid first outing for a short-staffed Thorns side against a brand-new Kansas City team that looked to still be finding their feet and struggled to dictate the game.
The Thorns started a few players in new positions—Rodríguez at the No. 6, Marissa Everett at the No. 10, and most delightfully, Kling at the No. 8 (again, more on that later)—but stuck with the 4-4-2 diamond from last season and deployed a game plan we’re used to seeing. They mostly defended well, working to keep KC out of the center of the field and looking to trap them on the wings. Offensively, they found success on set pieces and through direct attacks in transition, as well as using combinations between Kling, Rodríguez, and the overlapping runs of Madison Pogarch and Christen Westphal to break lines of pressure and get into dangerous areas.
Kansas City, meanwhile, often looked to trap Portland centrally. It sometimes worked, but more often ended either in a foul or with Kling or Rodríguez breaking the pressure and sending the ball into empty space between KC’s midfield and back line. In the second half, the visitors started to find more success defensively—while Portland’s defensive structure sometimes broke down—but the Thorns held on for the win despite a second-half goal by Amy Rodriguez shortly after Portland’s second. At the end of the game, one stat painted a clear picture of the gap between the two teams: Kansas City had just one player with a passing accuracy of 80% or higher, center back Rachel Corsie, while Portland had five, including Rodríguez.
All in all, it was a strong debut for Portland—not without some miscommunications and errors, but fewer than we might expect in a more normal year.
2. Meghan Klingenberg had a big day
Much of the Thorns’ offense last night went through Kling, who translated her status as a leader in the locker room into a shift as team captain—playing in central midfield!
I never would have anticipated this move from Mark Parsons, but as the game played out, it made sense. For one thing, Kling has always been an attacking-minded player, both as an outside back and at UNC, where she did shifts on all three lines. In addition, this Thorns formation involves the two No. 8s spending a lot of time out wide, something that added a new wrinkle to Lindsey Horan’s play last year. In that sense, her role last night shared similarities with her usual spot at left back: she linked up with Po to create wide overloads, sent in crosses, and defended the wing.
But she also did some things I’ve never seen her do with my own eyes. She dribbled and passed through the center of the field, broke through pressure from Kansas City, and worked to set up chances centrally. She looked confident under pressure and set a lot of Portland’s attacks in motion. It was strange to watch, like seeing your school librarian at the grocery store, but also very fun and on the whole pretty successful. When I asked her about it after the game, she had this to say:
“Well,KatelynBest,Ithinkthat,youknow,thathappenstomeallthetimeinpractice,andnoweverybodyjustgetstoseeitinthegame [laughs] Youknow, in rondosandallthesedifferentthings,I’maskedtohandlepressurefromallsides… I’vebeenaskingforyearstoplayin the [No.] 10—givemeashot,givemeachance,Mark,givemeatryout!And I finallygotone,sohopefullyIliveduptothetryout…Ithinklasttime,ItalkedtoAnson [Dorrance]thismorningbecauseit’shisbirthday.AndItoldhimthatIwasgoingtobeplayinginthe[No.] 8andhe’slike, ‘oh,you’llbefine.Youplayedthereforforusincollege.’Soitmademefeelbetteraboutit.”
3. Uhhhhhh
After a mostly straightforward 89 minutes, things got weird. There’s no need for me to rehash what we all saw, but I do want to say that multiple things can be true, and these are some things I believe to be true:
Danielle Chesky has a bad reputation for a reason; she’s already officiated games that turned ugly, she missed a number of clear calls in this one, and she probably should not be working at this level anymore. The quality of refereeing in the women’s game is a real issue and reflects a disparity with men’s soccer.
Morgan Weaver deserved a yellow. She clearly wrapped her arm around Kristen Edmonds’s waist, which seemed to be what caused them to both fall down. She then very clearly shoved Edmonds. That’s not nothing! Obviously Edmonds escalated and deserved to see red for that, but it defies reason to say Weaver did nothing wrong.
We’ve all been guilty of using language that seems innocuous to us, but might be loaded for other groups for reasons we don’t see in the moment. It’s a crucial skill for those of us with privilege—whether that’s based on race, gender, orientation, whatever—to be able to listen to marginalized people and admit when we made a mistake.
Simone Charley. Unrelated to the photos from Thorns media day. Photo by Kris Lattimore.
Well, you saw the title of this post. Let’s not waste any time gabbing away, hm?
11.
This one is good because Meaghan Nally’s friends and family get to enjoy her radiant smile, and also her enemies can see how strong and healthy her teeth are to know she will not be easily defeated.
Four women who went to Harvard Law are starting a boutique firm together. The office is a casual environment—one of them even brings her dog to work—and they do lots of pro-bono work for low-SES and undocumented clients. “We’re sort of like a family,” they say.
A true story about me is that one time Nadine Angerer called me a “soft egg,” which I guess means I’m squishy and delicate? It wasn’t an insult, but it also wasn’t a compliment. It was just an observation, like everything Germans say. Then she laughed good naturedly like this:
The most popular girl in school asks you to prom. She could have gone with anyone, but she chose you, the eccentric loner who eats lunch in the library and listens to bands no one else has heard of. You’re so different from everyone else, and she just wants to get to know you.
The girl who sits next to you in pre-calc asks you to prom. Your only real interactions are checking your homework together and passing notes about substitute teachers. She knows you don’t know each other very well but she thinks you’re really funny and thought it might be fun to hang out for the night? She really hopes this isn’t weird.
You’re sixteen years old and you just read one of your poems at an open mic night for the first time. Your big sister is going to college an hour away, and you invited her, but you weren’t sure if she’d come—but she did, and she’s so proud of you.
Oh, hello. Surprised to see me in your chambers? I’ve been waiting for you. That’s right, I know all about what happened to the queen’s prized jewels. The captain of the guard awaits only my command. You won’t last long in Her Majesty’s dungeon—and just when we were getting to be such good friends! Unless… we can work something out?
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.’”
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 Louisvilleselected Emma Ekicwith 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
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.”
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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