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Surprise! The Portland Thorns need a coach.
Former head coach Rob Gale is out, the club announced last week—a dismissal that started the offseason with a jolt, given that the club had competed in the NWSL semifinals just a week prior. Thorns general manager Jeff Agoos and his staff are now conducting a “comprehensive search” for the team’s new head coach.
There’s a fair number of options for Agoos to choose from—especially with an offseason to fill the position, rather than the midseason move the Thorns were working with when they named Gale to the head coach position in 2024.
And there’s not really a clear answer as to who exactly the club is looking for, beyond someone the players will rally around and who can help the Thorns keep growing into a championship-contending team.
So, who could be in? Here’s a (very noncomprehensive) list.
The Obvious Choice
Current interim Thorns head coach Sarah Lowdon has a strong case to make for herself. She’s been with the club since 2023, giving her a firsthand understanding of where the team has been recently. She’s coached at the collegiate and professional levels, serving as an interim head coach for the NWSL’s Houston Dash in two separate seasons, alongside working with U.S. Youth National Team programs.
During her career, Lowdon has proven herself to be a tactical-minded coach (something the Thorns will be looking for) who already knows the workings of the NWSL and has demonstrated her ability to get results.
Unfortunately for Lowdon, the biggest mark against her appointment has nothing to do with her résumé. The Thorns last two head coaches—Mike Norris in 2024 and Rob Gale in 2025—were both internal promotions of former assistants; the club hasn’t brought in a new face as their manager since Rhian Wilkinson took the helm in 2023. Portland’s “comprehensive search” for their next head coach hints they’re doing just that—and not promoting the woman down the hall.
The Big Name
Perhaps the biggest name in the coaching conversation is Twila Kilgore. Like Lowdon, Kilgore has coached at collegiate, professional (coincidentally, also as an assistant with the Dash) and U.S. Youth National Team levels. She was also an assistant for the full senior U.S. National team—and an interim head coach for the country. (She’s also well- respected; when I talked to former Houston player Annika Creel for a piece I was working on in 2020, Creel couldn’t praise Kilgore enough.)
Kilgore left the USWNT toward the end of 2024 and has spent the past year spending time with family and studying the game. She should be well prepared for whatever coaching position comes her way next.
The Thorns, though, might not be the logical jump for Kilgore. With former USWNT coach Vlatko Andonovski moving to a sporting director position with the Kansas City Current, he could be looking at a known profile like Kilgore—whose career has closely tracked his—to fill the head coaching role for the K.C. side.
The Wild Cards
Here’s where we get into pure speculation. Take your pick from any number of established assistant coaches in the NWSL (and at the collegiate level, and elsewhere in the world outside the U.S.). That could be anybody from someone like Orlando Pride assistant Yolanda Thomas to currently unattached former Costa Rican national team and Monterrey coach Amelia Valverde. And then there’s the less front-of-mind candidates like former USWNT star and Olympic gold medalist Steph Cox.
These days, Cox is a successful Division III coach at the University of Puget Sound.
Cox is certainly a wild card candidate here, but she’s not an impossible one; she did, after all, retire from professional the game in 2015, only to make a return as a defender for the Seattle Reign four years later. She’s also spent time as an assistant coach for the Reign and has spent time as an assistant coach for the USWNT U-23s. If Cox chose to go for the role, she’d have a solid bid to make at a coaching position for the Thorns—and a reason to look at Portland specifically, as she and her husband were both University of Portland athletes back in the day. It’s a long shot. But as the Thorns players like to ask: Why not?
