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Are you still floating? I am.
The Portland Thorns broke the Washington Spirit’s record-tying road winning streak on Sunday, preventing it from becoming a record-breaking streak with a 2–0 shutout.
Even cooler? It was Pride night, in a season when the club and supporters have made that value clear with more than lip service. “This is everyone’s game,” read a Rose City Riveters banner.
The game was certainly Reilyn Turner’s when she opened the scoring for Portland in the 39th minute with a perfectly placed shot off a Jessie Fleming nutmeg assist. I don’t remember the last time Providence Park sounded that loud. And then the “she’s our keeper!” chants cut through the stadium in the 80th, when Bella Bixby dove to her right to palm a shot from Makenna Morris wide and preserve Portland’s lead. And then rookie Pietra Tordin chipped the Spirit’s goalkeeper two minutes later to double the Thorns’ lead, and it was over.
So, what better time to check in about the first half of the Thorns’ 2025 season?
The Thorns sit in fifth place in the NWSL standings, and while they’re not the big-name-led Portland team of old, we’re starting to get a sense of what this new squad is about.
What have we learned this year?
Going into the season, I had questions about pretty much every part of this team—from their front office to their coaching staff (or lack thereof) to their new comms team to players on every line of the pitch.
We saw one of the first real tests of this year’s front office in March, when the Riveters found a fan distributing racist and transphobic flyers and wristbands ahead of Portland’s match against the North Carolina Courage. The Riveters took an immediate hard stance against transphobic messaging, and, per the Thorns communications team, the club eventually banned the individual from future Thorns matches. I wish there was a little more transparency from the front office on the whole situation, but I guess that’s what reporters are for.
On the field, we weren’t really sure what to expect; the Thorns had a handful of known players but a lot of new ones—and a couple of last year’s major signings returning from 2024, Fleming and Mackenzie Arnold, hadn’t really gotten their Willamette Valley legs under them during their first year with the club.
When Rob Gale took over the team as interim head coach in April 2024 (and then as the club’s permanent head coach three months later), the team’s refrain in press conferences was about playing with joy. It worked to a degree, especially in Gale’s earlier, interim coaching matches, but the Thorns were playing at a level that didn’t speak to their high-achieving reputation.
Gale has finally had the chance to put his free-flowing style of soccer to the test, a kind of play that relies on the 11 players on the field reading each other and the tempo of the game rather than a focus on positional roles. And anyone who steps in off the bench—be it for injury or to sub on to close out a match—must do the same.
“There’s a focus on wanting players to be more engaged in our development process,” midfielder Fleming says. “We’re reviewing a game ourselves at home, taking the initiative to clip things to review with coaches, versus coaches always initiating those interactions.”
It seems to be working all right so far; the Thorns have earned convincing home wins against an underperforming but star-studded NJ/NY Gotham FC and a second-in-the standings, reigning NWSL champion Orlando Pride.
I’ve been especially impressed by the play we’ve seen from Mackenzie Arnold pre-injury—she looked far more confident and positionally sound than she had last year—and with the immediate impact we’ve seen from rookies like Caiya Hanks and Jayden Perry.
But at the same time, that doesn’t mean this season’s been a rose garden.
“You’ve got to believe, and keep trusting the process, that performance will lead to results,” Gale told the media in April, “as long as we can be more clinical at one end, and at the opposite end, eliminate a one-v-one mistake where we should’ve actually won the ball on the halfway line.”
In other words, there are definitely areas the Thorns can improve—especially in terms of their defensive consistency in the first half of games and in getting sharper in front of goal to finish more chances. The good thing is that neither of those things feel like impossible tasks, especially for a team that’s already grown leaps and bounds in their overall cohesion in just three months and seems to have bought into growing together.
“We want to try and push for the title,” Thorns goalkeeper coach Jordan Felgate says. “We want to push, at least minimum, for playoffs.” Part of that is trying to earn convincing wins going into the league’s month-and-a-half break, setting Portland up in a good position to, in Felgate’s words, “come back all guns blazing and really, really push the second half of the season.” Fifth place certainly doesn’t make that second half goal look impossible.
And now we’ve got a month-and-a-half international break, with chances for the Thorns to bring in new players during the summer transfer window. With the recent news that co-captain Sam Coffey is under contract with Portland through 2027 and numerous players—including U.S. women’s national team star and 2024 leading goalscorer Sophia Wilson—presumably back in the fold next year, it feels like the Thorns don’t have major roster holes they need to fill during this period.
Still, it’s a break: a chance for the club to reassess and for the players to come back refreshed and focused on pushing for the second half of the season. If it’s anything like the first, we have a lot to look forward to.
NEXT MATCH
vs. chicago stars
7 pm Saturday, June 21
Providence Park