It is a well-established fact that the Thorns are not Sith. This is a good thing for all of us—particularly the younglings.
But if they were Sith, there would be a real disparity in the quality of Sith names throughout the Thorns roster. Adding Darth to your name is great when you are going by Vader, Sidious, or even Revan, but modern-day, real-life names lend themselves somewhat less to the intimidating air preferred by the adherents of the Dark Side.
I took a look at the Thorns roster and tried to pick out the best Sith name for each player: Darth followed by their first name, last name, or nickname.
24. Darth Charley – As someone with two first names, Simone Charley was always going to struggle in a ranking that is about a combination of intimidation and hard consonant sounds.
23. Darth Ellie
22. Darth Hubly
21. Darth Sophia
20. Darth Kat
19. Darth Everett
18. Darth Franch – I want to put Franch higher on this list mostly because she is one of the players on the Thorns I can best picture wielding a lightsaber (it is probably her haircut), but at the same time I just can’t get around the fact that her name doesn’t really let you sneer properly as you pronounce it.
17. Darth Westphal
16. Darth Rocky
15. Darth Salem
14. Darth Menges
13. Darth Ogle
12. Darth Heath
11. Darth Britt
10. Darth Seiler – Any name ending in an “r” is much easier to imagine Emporer Palpatine growling in warning.
“You will not fail me again, Darth Seiler.”
9. Darth Lussi
8. Darth Weaver
7. Darth Cel
6. Darth Bella – The Sith of the extended Star Wars Universe have a long history of using Latin-ish words as their names. Tyranus, Iratus, Nihilus, and Rictus have all graced the Galaxy far, far away, and Bella, the plural for war in Latin, fits right in with the theme.
Of course, if Bella Bixby had stayed Bella Geist, she would have been an easy contender for the top ranking on this list.
Right off the bat, let’s be clear: the Thorns are not evil. They are a group of human women who play soccer professionally—emphatically not a shadowy warrior cult strong in the dark side of the Force. None of them would ever murder their dark mentor as part of the ancient, never-ending cycle of apprentice betraying master. I doubt any of them even owns a laser sword.
But, I mean…
You know what they say: a rose by any other name would be equally vicious and power-hungry
It’s not like they don’t want us to make that connection, right?
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So, if the Thorns were both fueled and consumed by a supernatural rage, and they did all own laser swords, and if their laser swords were the glowing red of a Dathomirian sunset, what would that look like? In other words, which Sith Lords best exemplify the essences of which Portland Thorns?
Lindsey Horan: Darth Vader
In the 2015/2016 offseason, the Thorns were coming off a dark year. Their season had been thrown into turmoil by the Clone Wars 2015 World Cup, they’d just shaken up their coaching staff, and the roster was undergoing an almost total rebuild. One bright spot on the horizon was Lindsey Horan, the immensely talented young American whose arrival had been foretold generations ago as the one who would bring balance to the Force. Like Vader, Horan does it all, by herself if she needs to: she defends, she sets attacks up, and she scores, sometimes all in a single play.
Christine Sinclair: Darth Sidious
Christine Sinclair may be one of the best goal scorers of all time, but for a player as immensely powerful as she is, her game is surprisingly understated. She’s cool and calculated, always lurking near goal when you least expect her, waiting for the fortuitous moment to strike. She makes an impact even when the other team thinks they’ve got her marked out of the game. And off the field, she’s famously quiet. She’s been in charge for years, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you might not even know it.
Tobin Heath: Darth Maul
A double-bladed lightsaber is the sword version of a cheeky nutmeg: few people can even control it without putting themselves in danger, let alone use it effectively in a duel. Some would call it unnecessarily flashy, but unnecessary flash is exactly what makes millions of people fall in love with the game. In my book, Tobin Heath gets unfairly labeled as all style and no substance too often, but the style? Nobody can deny the style.
Becky Sauerbrunn: Count Dooku
Count Dooku was a Jedi master—trained by none other than Yoda—who turned to the dark side late in his career, setting in motion key events in galactic history. While Becky Sauerbrunn has yet to put on a Thorns jersey, it’s not hard to imagine that one of the most decorated center backs of all time could be a difference maker for a team whose weak point has been defense in recent years. She’s already won two NWSL championships and two World Cups—a third NWSL ring, presumably suffused with dark energy and giving off a faint red glow, would be a great addition to that trophy case.
Mark Parsons: Darth Bane
Mark Parsons isn’t a Thorn, per se, but bear with me: Darth Bane was the ancient Sith lord who restructured an order on the brink of collapse. He introduced the rule of two, which limits the entire Sith order to a single master and their apprentice. When Parsons arrived in 2016, the Thorns were on shaky ground, and he restructured the team in a number of ways, bringing in a largely new roster and building a team-focused culture that prioritizes hard work and effort. The Thorns as we know them today wouldn’t exist without him.
On what would have been the home opening weekend for the Chicago Red Stars, Katelyn Best and Tyler Nguyen join Sandra Herrera and Claire Watkins of Southside Trap (the premier Chicago Red Stars podcast) to talk through the nuttiness of the 4–4 Red Stars/Thorns draw last year.
A ludicrous, sloppy, and magical game more reminiscent of 2014 than the modern NWSL era, it featured some season-defining play from Meghan Klingenberg, some breakout moments from Midge Purce and Gabby Seiler, and the greatest team goal in NWSL history—scored by Michele Vasconcelos against a Thorns defense that could only gawk as the Red Stars attack passed them by.
“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.
“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?
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.
On Wednesday night, full of optimism about the start of the Thorns’ preseason camp and also willing to talk about the start of the Timbers’ season, we held our first question and answer thread over on our Discord server.
Since then, the sporting situation in Portland and around the world has changed drastically. Still, how Kyle feels about Eryk Williamson or how we all feel about Amandine Henry will not change just because some dumb virus is reshaping society as we know it.
With that in mind, here are a few of your questions from Wednesday’s Q&A on the Rose City Review Discord.
(Some of the questions and answers have been edited for clarity.)
Which former Thorn is the most likely to return to the team?
Do not take this as a prediction or as actual reporting, but I know the Thorns would love to have Amandine Henry back. The question is whether she has any reason to ever come back to the States (or, as we’re calling it now, STATES). It’s probably not impossible, but don’t get your hopes up.
-Katelyn Best
I would say probably Haley Raso still, just because of her connections here. But I don’t see it as being particularly likely that anyone is returning.
-Tyler Nguyen
Who is your favorite player on either team who may not necessarily be the best or see regular minutes?
For me, that has to be Marvin Loria. I am convinced that Loria has what it takes to be a starter-level player in MLS. He is fast, creative, and a hard worker. Of course, he is also injured pretty regularly, which is why we rarely saw him later on during the 2019 season.
Loria may never get the chance to regularly start for the Timbers, as the team has been pretty dead set on using their DP slots on wingers and forwards, but I could certainly see him making an impact off the bench or in spot starts and either getting traded within the league or (more likely) sold outside of it. To me, the latter seems even more likely now that MLS has increased the amount of money that teams get from selling players on.
Of course, I would also be happy just having him stay with the Timbers and doing dope stuff like this.
-Will Conwell
I think for me, that answer is Eryk Williamson. He seems to be on the bubble between the first team and Timbers 2. I watched quite a bit of T2 last season and he was arguably the best player, controlling the game, and I think was in the top half of USL in assists a season ago.
In what I’ve seen of him when he gets first-team minutes, I think he has a lot of potential. He is smooth on the ball, and I believe would be a good creator. He can play as a No. 10 in the middle of the action, but he can also play as a connector in the No. 8 slot, which is what he told me that he envisions himself being.
I think we might see more of him in the future when it comes time to rest Diego Valeri during condensed stretches of play in the summer. If anything, his defense might need the most improving, but creativity wise he could help the Timbers when it comes to breaking down low blocks and be an overall asset to the first team.
-Kyle Pinnell
I’m super partial to Marissa Everett this year because of her skill set and the fact that she’s a Duck. I think fans should be into that stuff. She’s a smooth-passing forward, and there’s no reason that she can’t be a bench player on the Thorns for a long time.
-Tyler
Photo by Nikita Taparia
Is the Thorns’ youth movement perfectly timed or exquisitely timed? Which of the Thorns’ young players should I be frigging stoked for, and which will need some time or never contribute?
Take a huge grain of salt with this because I watch zero college soccer, but my understanding is that we should all be pretty fucking excited about Sophia Smith. She scored a bunch of goals at Stanford, but reportedly her intelligence, for a player her age, is off the charts. She might really be the mythical goal-scoring forward Thorns fans are always begging for—as well as having the technical skill and athleticism the Thorns coaching staff wants up top.
As far as timing? I’m not sure. As I’ve said in a few other places, the whole league is in a kind of purgatory right now as we wait for expansion to blow everyone up—that, plus Sinclair’s eventual retirement, is going to necessitate a rebuild within the next few years. That could mean Portland builds a new roster with their existing young players, or—possibly more likely—it could mean they trade them away post-expansion for some star power. Or, y’know, a mix of both.
-Katelyn
The youth stuff is funny because, yes, the Thorns are getting young in offense, but they’re also getting older on defense, and this club is constantly trying to refresh its roster. The new shit is that we have youngsters with pedigrees. That’s weird.
It will be great to see if we can have even better results teaching blue-chip talent instead of doing the usual miracle work with players who other teams didn’t see the value in
-Tyler
Who is Chris Duvall’s backup?
This is a good question and one that the Timbers seem far too likely to need to answer to at some point, given the early-season injury history among their defenders.
To my mind there are three different approaches that Gio and company can take here:
1. Flip a left back: just figure out which of Farfan or Villafana have a better right foot and move them on over.
2. Convert a center back: send Julio Cascante out there. He has done it before (I think). If he was not injured already, Bill Tuiloma would be another possibility in here, but as a left-sided player, playing him on the right would kind of fall back into category No. 1.
3. Get a little crazy: play a Chara at wing back. Or try out Renzo Zambrano out there. Why not?
Really, though, my bet would be Cascante.
-Will
Photo by Kris Lattimore
Does Providence Park or the training facility have super low doorways, or are there other reasons our team [the Timbers] is so damn short?
It is Diego Chara’s fault.
And, in a way, Kris Boyd’s.
Chara was the Timbers’ first big signing and, ten years in, is their most influential player. His success—followed by Boyd’s failure—has heralded an approach to player signing from Gavin Wilkinson and company that focuses on technique and ball retention. For Chara, his ability to win the ball, pivot on it, and take it around a defender with a simple juke are all amplified by his short stature, low stance, and somehow subterranean center of gravity.
Plus, the Timbers just signed his brother, who is actually even shorter. That can’t have helped their average height.
-Will
Does Gio-ball actually exist and did they play it at Cosmos? If so, was it because of him or despite him?
My understanding of Gio-ball is that it’s the kind of front-foot, attacking, high-press soccer we’ve seen glimpses of from the Timbers over the last month. Specifically, the first 30 minutes or so in the opener felt a lot closer to how I’ve always thought Gio wants to play than we’ve seen from the Timbers before. Obviously, it’s not an easy style to master because, as we saw, the defense has to be very disciplined to not get caught way out of position, but with more and more signings during the Gio era, one would imagine the team will continue to progress in that direction.
-Zach Kay
Is Andy Polo the fastest Timber? why don’t we EVER play him into space?
He’s definitely fast, and while I appreciate what he does in the middle third, he’s definitely shown that he doesn’t consistently have a killer instinct or top-quality decision making in the final third. Putting someone into space is really only useful if they can turn that advantageous position into a goal or an assist, so until he’s doing that on a regular basis, it makes more sense to use his athleticism for other things.
-Zach
I agree with a lot of what Zach said. Polo is fast, but he also only has one regular season goal in over two seasons which is not… ideal considering he takes up one of the attacking spots. He does need some better decision making in the final third like Zach mentioned because, ideally, wingers in a sit-back-and-counter setup would help combine and unlock the opposing defense, and if he is not able to do that often, the Timbers lack an advantage at one of their attacking options.
What has piqued my interest over the past month is how Gio is using him in the offense. In preseason, Gio played him in midfield a lot, which, as you mentioned, doesn’t take advantage of his pace or the space afforded. The wingers have also been tasked with playing an entire sideline. For example, Blanco and Yimmi both seem to be playing in the defensive third as much as in the attacking third, which takes focus away from what they are best at. This actually benefits Polo, as he is a decent defensive option, but on the offensive end, he is most important as an attacking winger, and that’s a facet of his game that he needs to work on.
-Kyle
Will Renzo Zambrano and Marvin Loria disappear again, or will they take another step this year?
I hold a ton of Zambrano stock, and (up until Polo started playing more in central mid this year) I’d been excited for him to be the first-off-the-bench CDM. The times he played next to Paredes last year really sold me on those two next to each other being the future of the Timbers central midfield. Obviously, there’s still some growth that needs to happen before then, but I would be very disappointed if he doesn’t get significantly more minutes this year. Zambrano also happens to be my answer to “who is your favorite player who may not see regular minutes”.
-Zach
I made it out to training today, and Gio mentioned Loria as someone who, when he returns to the team from his time with the Costa Rica u23s in Olympic Qualifying, would make an impact for the side. I take that, along with my general enjoyment of his style of play, to mean that he is in the Timbers’ first-team plans this year.
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.
