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.
