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You couldn’t blame M.A. Vignola for feeling a little culture shock. She arrived in Portland with the October rain, via a midseason trade from glitzy Los Angeles, replacing one of the Thorns’ most beloved players.
But Vignola and Portland had something in common. “I already disliked Seattle,” she said after the Thorns’ 2–0 victory over their rivals last month. “So coming here wasn’t that big of an adjustment for me.”
With an offseason under her belt, Vignola, a fullback, is poised to be an impactful piece of the Thorns’ 2026 campaign—even amid a stacked outside back pool that includes Mexican international Reyna Reyes, the German Marie Müller, and Mallie McKenzie. But her focus is just on helping her team.
In fact, Vignola isn’t thinking much about fighting for a starting role. “It boosts the competition in practice,” she says, “but we all have that mindset of, ‘I’m here to work on and bring what I know how to bring.’”
It’s a mindset that’s allowed her to step back a little, to be less of a perfectionist, to focus on finding joy in the game rather than fixating on working her way back onto the U.S. women’s national team. She’s found herself a little too locked in on that last part over the past couple of years; her first and only call-up to the senior USWNT came in September 2023.
But this year, Vignola’s refocused. She’s raring to play the best soccer she can for the Thorns, to make her presence felt on both sides of the pitch.
“This is a great environment to be able to build my personal confidence back up,” she says. “Who I am on the field will translate, and whatever is going to happen is supposed to happen.”
It makes sense that Vignola is learning to go with the flow. Her arrival in Portland from Angel City wasn’t the payoff of a long, premeditated process.
Quite the opposite. In the week leading up to Angel City’s Sept. 27, 2025, match at Racing Louisville, she was aware of trade talks. “But I had to focus on that game,” she recalls, “whether it was going to be my last game at Angel City or I was going to finish the season with them.”
On her flight back to Los Angeles the morning after a 1–0 defeat, Vignola got a text from her agent: The Portland Thorns had agreed to a deal.
Vignola was set to join her new club the next day.
“I had to say goodbye to everyone pretty quickly and leave that life in L.A.,” she says. “But I think it was a blessing in the sense [that] there wasn’t a lot of time to think.”
The Thorns and Angel City announced the move two days after Vignola touched down in Portland: Fan-favorite Thorns midfielder Hina Sugita was headed to Los Angeles in exchange for Vignola and $600,000 of intraleague transfer funds. Sugita’s trade was a stinging loss for the Thorns. But Vignola was able to make an immediate impact, shoring up Portland’s leaky backline. The team let in only one goal with her on the pitch for the rest of the season.
She credits her seamless fit to the open arms with which the team received her.
Perhaps it helped that Vignola’s route to the NWSL had been unconventional. After playing for the University of Tennessee, she skipped the NWSL draft, and instead signed with Throttur in Iceland in 2020. A year later, she jumped over to Valur, another Icelandic side—and tore the acetabular labrum in her right hip in her first match. (She played on the injury.) When Angel City came knocking the next year, she answered but spent most of the year rehabbing her hip; Vignola didn’t take the pitch for the Los Angeles club until September 2022.
In that journey, she crossed paths with many Thorns players. She grew up playing with Sam Hiatt on youth national teams, knew Olivia Moultrie and Sam Coffey from her time with the USWNT, and had trained with Reilyn Turner at Angel City when Turner was at UCLA.
She’s also grown close with fellow defender Isabella Obaze and forward Caiya Hanks—the latter of whom shares her interest in astrology. (Vignola’s an Aquarius sun, Leo moon and Cancer rising for those who are curious, which she says describes her “to a T.” She adds: “An emotional ball of love is all I am.”)
But Vignola’s smooth transition to Portland was a full-team effort.
“The girls, they made it so easy for me to integrate myself,” she told the media after Portland’s whirlwind 2–0 victory over the Seattle Reign in March. “We talk about that so much this year: Building relationships off the field is huge, and having that trust in each other on and off the field makes it so much easier to play.”
And those off-the-field relationships can’t hurt Vignola trying to strike a balance between her professional career and her life outside it.
To balance all the soccer, she’s been getting into reading (she offers apologies to all her teachers who knew her before), journaling and drawing when she has free time. She’ll take walks along the Willamette River with her dog or grab a matcha in town (Stumptown has been her go-to, but she’s on the hunt for others).
But she’s still chasing success on the field—both the long-term goal of getting back on the national team and more immediately helping her team make bids at a first-place finish in league standings and a championship run.
It’s certainly not an unrealistic aspiration for a team coming off a third-place finish in 2025—especially one full of young talent and returning stars and revitalized by a new coach.
“I know that we’re going to do everything that we can to make sure that we can get in the best spot possible to fight in playoffs,” Vignola says. “I’m just excited to see where this team goes.”
