Tag: NWSL

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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

Three Takeaways from Portland 0, OL Reign 0

Photo by Rob Gray/ISI Photos

The final game of the Thorns Extended NWSL Challenge Cup Preseason ended in a scoreless draw. A late Chicago winner last night means that the Thorns will be squaring directly up with the North Carolina Courage in the quarterfinals.

The Thorns haven’t had the most productive tournament in terms of goals, but if we look at these games as a challenge for a rebuilding squad to test themselves against, they’re getting what they came here for. They’ve faced off against the toughest teams in the tournament and are about to go against the best once again.

New look Reign are not pretty, but they’re effective

OL Reign have been a real mystery so far this tournament. They have a different style of play than anyone in the league has ever had. It hasn’t been great to look at, and the Reign didn’t have a single shot through 30 minutes of this game. But the Reign did not need a win today, and Portland did. New Reign coach Farid Benstiti has made it a point for his team to not lose in this tournament, and his team played a specific game to prevent that above all.

Parsons got his forward rotation wrong

The Thorns started with Simone Charley and Morgan Weaver up top, and with Portland very comfortably parked directly in front of the Reign box in the first half, it seemed like kind of a waste.

You see, Simone Charley Ran Track. She’s fast. She’s also a sprinter who usually does not last 90 minutes because of how much she puts into every forward run. Charley was putting up a real fight pressing the Reign backline in the first half. But with the Reign sitting very deep, it felt like a waste. Charley’s best moments are in the open field where she can put defenders on skates, create separation from her defenders, and create. Up against a set defense, however, she and the rest of the team struggled to do more than cross the ball somewhat aimlessly.

As the game opened up in the second half, Charley came off for Tyler Lussi in what was pretty clearly a planned substitution at the 60 minute mark. Unfortunately, the first few actions of the second half were Charley’s best of the game, with her crossing into the center where no one was waiting, only to put the second service over the bar.

There’s obviously no telling how games will go ahead of time. But most people could probably have told you that the game was going to open up the more that it went on. It was a shame not to have her speed on the break as both teams got more frantic. The rotation in the first game against North Carolina, with Lussi and Marissa Everett eating up minutes and pressing the backline only for Weaver and Charley to come on later, may be one we see against the Courage a second time on Friday.

A makeshift backline once again gets the job done

Emily Menges was not available for selection today after showing up as questionable on the injury report. With Becky Sauerbrunn out for the tournament, Meghan Klingenberg was the only locked-in first choice Thorns player in defense going up against a Reign team that looked, on paper, very strong. Bethany Balcer had to depart early, but Jodie Taylor and Sofia Huerta are both highly experienced NWSL attackers. Yes, the Reign played conservatively, but all three forwards are more than capable of making things happen on their own.

And basically nothing happened. The Reign couldn’t put a single shot in for the first 35 minutes, and when they grew into the game in the second half, a defensive setup that could have been shaky ended up looking solid.

Kelli Hubly has now started three games for the Thorns in central defense. One or two mishaps aside, Hubly looked solid, putting in some strong tackles on Reign forward Yuka Momiki to keep the most dangerous Reign player pretty contained. Christen Westphal looks totally comfortable at right back for this team, providing important offense down the flank.

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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

New Tournament, New Faces

Photo by Portland Thorns FC/Craig Mitchelldyer.

The way the Portland Thorns ended their 2019 season was disappointing to everyone involved. With only one win and one goal in their final six games—and that nightmarish 6–0 loss to the North Carolina Courage—it was clear that the offseason would bring a number of changes.

“Short tournament [or] long season, our identity—especially after last year, where I think our identity had become very gray—our identity is our highest priority,” Thorns head coach Mark Parsons told media this week. “Because we think that leads to high performance, and we believe high performance leads to success.”

The player movement was as drastic as foreshadowed. Portland waived Ana-Maria Crnogorčević, and Dagný Brynjarsdóttir returned to Iceland. Emily Sonnett ventured southeast to the Orlando Pride. Caitlin Foord and Hayley Raso were lost to the Australian exodus from the NWSL. (Technically, Foord was also traded to the Pride, but the end result was the same.) Andressinha was finally freed—unfortunately, not from the bench, but from Portland. Midge Purce was sent to Sky Blue, Elizabeth Ball to Utah.

Then there were those brought into the team. Raquel Rodríguez and Becky Sauerbrunn came in via trade. At this year’s draft, the Thorns claimed first and second overall picks Sophia Smith and Morgan Weaver, as well as Meaghan Nally and Christen Westphal—the latter through a trade with then-Reign FC.

But where does that leave us? Without the likes of Ball, Purce, and Raso, for one thing—all players who had grown into key roles in their time with the club. And while—for the most part—the individual moves make sense on paper, the overall trend means most Thorns players are very young or nearing the end of their careers, with few individuals in between. The notable exception is the midfield, although questions remain about how exactly a partnership between Rodríguez and Lindsey Horan will work, and Gabby Seiler and Angela Salem are both working their way back from ACL tears.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting that the core of the Thorns is still very much intact, Sonnett excluded. Assuming everyone makes the trek to Utah, Adrianna Franch will still be in goal; Emily Menges will help anchor the backline; Horan, Tobin Heath, and Christine Sinclair are still key players in Portland’s attack.

But three of those players are over 30, as are Sauerbrunn and a handful of others. And while they’re all still effective on the field, they’ll likely be playing closely managed minutes—especially given the NWSL Challenge Cup’s compacted schedule.

Parsons addressed the challenges of training for a tournament in which his squad will be playing two games on short rest in the preliminary round alone—a number that will only grow as Portland advances through the Cup. “It’s not about getting every single player prepared and ready to play every single 90 minutes throughout this tournament,” he explained. “It’s not possible, it’s not going to be safe.”

In a sport where defensive consistency is key, it will be interesting to see how lineup rotation plays out across Portland’s backline—especially given that the majority of expected starters fall into the aforementioned age binary. Sauerbrunn, though still a solid player, has shown signs of slowing down, Meghan Klingenberg is now 31, and Katherine Reynolds—likely the first player off the bench in Ball’s absence—is 32.

On the other hand, there’s Ellie Carpenter, who has years of international experience, but also turned 20 just over a month ago. Seiler can also jump into defense if needed. Behind them, there’s a handful of players that are either coming off a 2019 season in which they barely played, or are new to the league altogether. (Although many of the former have looked solid in the time they have gotten, it remains to be seen how that translates as they begin to play more substantial minutes.)

“Every player knows they’re all going to be needed,” said Parsons. And while he’s done a phenomenal job in the player development department these past few years, that often entails gradually building game time—a luxury not afforded by the Challenge Cup schedule.

Portland’s youth is especially evident across its attacking line, with Smith, Weaver, and potentially a couple non-roster invitees joining the already-young group of Simone Charley, Marissa Everett, and Tyler Lussi. Based on the club’s preseason roster, the only real exception to this pattern is Christine Sinclair, although if the Thorns use their regular formation we’ll see Heath up there, too.

Regardless, there’s no way a 37-year-old Sinclair will play a significant role in every match, and all three of the players who stepped in as a No. 10 last year have since departed the team. That leaves a lot of Portland’s attack up to a handful of relatively inexperienced—though admittedly talented—individuals. 

The other thing? The Thorns don’t get a preseason tournament this year. Parsons described that his communication with new players has catered to the lack of time to experiment. He explained the importance of establishing identity and expectations, clarifying where he sees a player helping the club, and that he wants the player to be “[themselves] in the rest of the areas.”

However, the lack of preseason opponents still presents questions for a team that likes to use that time allow players to showcase their strengths and test out prospective depth pieces.

“These players need minutes… to develop,” acknowledged Parsons. While the Thorns aren’t necessarily able to provide that time in preseason matches, Portland’s coaching staff has compensated with full-sided scrimmages.

Parsons remains optimistic about his group’s talent. Although preparation time is more limited, that a significant portion of the roster hasn’t played all that much in the NWSL means another thing: the Thorns will be harder to scout. “It’s an advantage that we know [our young players] and others don’t,” said Parsons, “and obviously we have a tournament [where] they’re gonna have to step up and step in. I’m confident that this experience is going to be a hugely positive one for them.”

However it shakes out, it’s pretty clear that that first match against North Carolina is going to be something—and that something will almost definitely sloppy and leave us with more questions than answers. 

But despite the uncertainty, one thing is clear: what we see from the young players who are called to step into bigger roles during this tournament will be our first look at what this team can become.

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Soccer Thorns

This Magic Moment

Photo by Nikita Taparia
“Do you know what? Yeah. It might take us a while to get to where we want to get to, but we’re gonna get there, and you can just remember this fucking goal.”

When the Thorns aired their first-ever home game, against the Reign, last weekend, I recognized almost nothing. Christine Sinclair, of course, was there, looking roughly the same as she had since 2005 and also roughly the same as she looks today. Other than her? Any familiar faces were shuffled out of place. Mana Shim sat on the bench, anonymous. Michelle Betos was in goal for the other team. Alex Morgan, well—that’s an article unto itself, the story of who Alex Morgan was in Portland, who people thought she was, who they wanted her to be, how they remember her today. Allie Long, I guess, was more or less the same player, but she didn’t look the same.

Weirdly, the Seattle Reign, in terms of personnel anyway, felt more familiar. The team underwent massive turnover between 2013 and 2014, but the bones of who they would be over the next few years were already in place. There was Laura Harvey, of course; on the field, there were Lu Barnes, Elli Reed, Keelin Winters, Jess Fishlock.

Ah, Jess Fishlock.

It’s strange to think that we ever didn’t know who Fishlock was, but back then, of course, pretty much nobody in the states did. This was the curse of coming from a country like Wales in 2013—even avid women’s soccer fans simply had no way of watching her. On that day, the commentators (Ann Schatz, may god bless her and keep her, was another familiar feature of that broadcast) explained we should watch the woman who looked kind of, but not really, like Megan Rapinoe.

The crowd didn’t know yet who Fishlock was, how they were supposed to respond to her, but on some instinctive level, she knew exactly who she was to them. “I love a big crowd,” she says of Providence Park. “It’s like a cauldron in there. It’s amazing.”

This is the thing about Fishlock: in her own way, she loves Portland, and Thorns fans, whether they admit it or not, need her. A villain, like a photographic negative, forms and sharpens a club’s vision of itself. Without an antagonist, there’s no reason to watch.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Fishlock announced herself quickly that day. Despite playing for what would turn out to be an abysmal Reign side—”I already knew by that point it was going to be a slog,” she remembers—she was the best player on the field, for either team.

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t want to hear that. Keep in mind, though, that the actual soccer in the NWSL in 2013 was really rather bad. Few players could quite control the ball; fewer still could reliably pass it along the ground to another player.

Amid the chaos, Fishlock gave us a glimpse into the future. She was physical, of course, but unlike with the thoughtless and often bizarre violence being carried out by those around her (on both sides), there was a purpose to everything she did. As the game went on, she was clearly frustrated, but she was also laser-focused. Her frustration only seemed to sharpen her. This player—physical, athletic, wildly competitive, but incredibly skilled—was the embodiment of what the NWSL would become over the next six years. She was the ideal NWSL player before the NWSL really existed.

As the Thorns went up a goal, then two goals, as 16,000 fans clapped and sang and reveled in seeing their new team for the first time, she knew what had to happen.

“I don’t want us to leave here,” she remembers thinking, “and have them have a clean sheet… We were like, ‘fuck’—excuse my French—we were just like, ‘fuck, if we’re gonna lose, fine, we’re gonna fucking lose, but we’re gonna fucking score. Like, because we’re gonna make sure that these [the fans] are like, dead silent for like, a millisecond.’”

And then, right on cue, she did, cleanly slotting a half-volley just inside the post as Winters knocked Nikki Marshall over. Just as Fishlock had planned, the stadium was silent for a heartbeat. She pounded the crest on her shirt and pumped her fist, and Providence Park erupted.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Fishlock is the perfect villain not because she’s physical, or even because she dives, but because she is undeniably very, very good. There was no shortage of fouls in that game, but if that was what mattered, Kaylyn Kyle would have been marked down as an enemy, too. What mattered was the goal—the spoiling of the Thorns’ home debut.

That moment, in retrospect, would prove more definitional for the Thorns—not as a team, necessarily, but as a club—than anything else that happened that season, including the championship win. It was as if everyone in the stadium, in unison, suddenly remembered a fundamental fact about the world. Here is our team; here is our enemy. Thus has it always been, and thus shall it ever be.

The end of that season ushered in an era of rapid change in Portland. Cindy Parlow Cone left. Paul Riley arrived in a whirlwind, then blew away in a cloud of dust. Kat Williamson left, then came back, then retired, Vero Boquete and Jessica McDonald both spent short, magnificent stints in Portland, Nadine Angerer became a fixture. Through it all, Thorns fans made regular pilgrimages to a concrete relic in the shadow of the Space Needle, hoping that this time they’d get to drive home victorious, fixing their ire on the diminutive Welshwoman when they didn’t.

A play in three acts:

“I actually miss her,” Nash Drake, the Thorns fan who composed the first tweet above, confessed to me. “The thing about Fishlock is that she understands what rivalry means… It’s kind of like two guys sitting around drinking beer and hitting each other.”

This is rivalry in its highest form: a drama that goes on as long as there’s something for it to go on about, but which both sides, at the end of the day, know they’re choosing to participate in. It’s real, but it’s also not real. We’re doing it because it’s fun.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if it turned out we couldn’t all be friends?

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Soccer Thorns

I Was 12 When the Thorns Won in 2013

Photo by Nikita Taparia

I didn’t watch the first Thorns home game live; I didn’t see them claim the 2013 NWSL Championship. I keep joking that it’s because I was, like, 12 at the time, but I need to stop doing that because I literally was 12. Or rather, I was 11 when the season started and turned 12 halfway through. And although this “PTFC: From the Archives” series means I’m catching these matches for the first time, I can still reminisce about when I started following the team, about the shitty YouTube streams and what it feels like to grow up in a city that takes so much pride in women’s soccer.

I wasn’t really a “soccer kid” growing up; I played because my friends did, but just on rec teams (barring a brief stint with a club that was so small that we didn’t really get the benefits of playing club soccer). I watched the USWNT lose the 2011 World Cup Final in a penalty shootout to Japan—at the request of my dad, not because I knew anything about the team.

Regardless of my lack of investment at the time, I knew that women’s soccer existed in Portland: we launched a professional team in 2013, they were good, and people cared about them (and they cared about them a lot).

I didn’t get into soccer until the 2015 World Cup, until the Gals pulled out a 2-0 semifinal victory over a very skilled German squad and went on to win the final match within the game’s first 20 minutes, until Abby Wambach embraced Sarah Huffman on live television and someone watching with me commented that they looked like such good friends.

After the tournament, I turned to where I knew I could support women’s soccer more locally: the Thorns. I was enthralled by the energy of the Riveters, by the electric atmosphere at Providence Park, by players like Mana Shim who were like me in a way that I was still struggling to name. The culture around women’s soccer embraced community in a way that was unfamiliar to my just-out-of-middle-school self; there was a sense of “come as you are and we will welcome you.”

In 2015, I also started high school. I won’t go into all that here, but the change of scenery brought newfound freedom and friends, including people who were in the same unsure and messy place as I was. And while freshman year was downright unpleasant for the most part, it was healing to have people in my life who were in that same period of questioning—maybe not questioning, but coming to terms with a fact about ourselves that we’d tried to push away for so long.

Between friends and the community I found in women’s soccer, I reached a place where I could feel okay about being a lesbian. I discovered there is something powerful in solidarity. And I became an NWSL fan in the process. 

Because beyond the Megan Rapinoes—the big names who were unapologetic in their gayness—beyond the players and fans that crafted a space that was, and (for the most part) is, a bubble where queer people are free to exist, women’s soccer is fun. The NWSL loves to tout its parity and, while the same handful of clubs seem to be the ones in postseason every year, there’s something enticing about knowing that the last-place Boston Breakers can pull out two wins over defending champion FC Kansas City, even if FCKC wasn’t quite the same without Lauren Holiday. (While we’re here, let’s take a moment of silence in memory of both these teams.)

And there’s something captivating about the Thorns: adorned in red kits with the Riveters at their backs, cheering as Adrianna Franch pulls out a save that maybe shouldn’t be physically possible, or as Tobin Heath befuddles yet another defender. It feels fitting to see that same celebrity awarded to players who don’t have the international pedigree of Christine Sinclair—to Shim and Kat Williamson, Midge Purce and Emily Menges. There’s something fulfilling in the Riveters’ unwavering support for the Thorns and for each other.

I joined my high school’s newspaper halfway through junior year—I had a free period, and I’d heard good things about the class. For something I essentially started on a whim, journalism has redefined the lens through which I view the world and myself, providing me with a sense of identity that centers around saying what I believe in, and giving me the tools and platform to do so.

I began writing about women’s soccer last year. At the encouragement of a friend, I reached out to Tyler on Twitter and asked if Stumptown Footy would consider a high school student as a contributor. The rest is pretty well-documented online.

Writing about women’s soccer, elevating the stories of the people who play it (or in this case, my own story), makes me feel like I have a purpose in the world. Covering the Thorns is wonderful, but it’s also weird and frustrating to do something I enjoy and to know that it’s not—and probably never will be—a viable career. Nevertheless, this is something I want to do as long as I can, because the community we have in Portland is extraordinary. 

Within the players on the pitch and the photographers along the sidelines, from the artists and drummers and capos and yellers that make up the Riveters to the handful of us in the press box, Providence Park brings us together and makes us something bigger than ourselves.