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Pietra Tordin makes a point to focus on something other than soccer every day.
It’s how she gets through the constant training and travel, how she stops herself from getting overwhelmed by the demands of a professional athlete.
She calls her parents in Miami at least once a day. She picnics in Laurelhurst Park or hits up a thrift store in town. She loves cooking—lots of soups and stews, or making a steak over the phone with her brother or an Iranian dish with her best friend, Princeton University men’s soccer player Bardia Hormozi. She journals, goes for walks to appreciate the spring flowers, or calls her sister, who picks all of Tordin’s matchday outfits.
All that energy devoted to time off the field helps Tordin recenter herself on it.
The Portland Thorns forward has three goals and three assists in her first nine games of the 2026 NWSL season. She’s played the most minutes of any of Portland’s forwards. And Thorns head coach Robert Vilahamn wants to keep giving her that time.
“She’s one of the most technical players I’ve seen in how she can handle the ball in tight areas,” he said in a press conference last week. “But still being a threat in behind and still being a goalscorer, that’s not so common.”
Though superstar striker Sophia Wilson’s return to the pitch this season pushes Tordin from her natural central role to a more wide position, Vilahamn said he still wants Tordin on the field.
“I believe in her so much,” he said, even with the position switch. “She’s been very consistent. She’s doing points, she does assists, she does goals. She’s very impactful on the ball.”
All that praise for someone who didn’t even realize she had the option of playing professionally until the summer after her freshman year of college.
“A big part of why I went to Princeton is because I was like, ‘Damn, I’m just gonna have to get my degree. Soccer is no good after this; I gotta lock in,’” Tordin says. She figured she’d graduate, move to New York City and get some sort of job in finance.
Tordin recalls a phone call with one of her high school coaches during that first year of college, and the coach asking if she was ready to take the next step. Tordin was befuddled. When she asked her coach if he was serious about her having the option to play professionally, he laughed.
“I was like, ‘Something funny? What’s going on?’” she says. “Is this something I could actually do?”
Then came the summer of 2023, and with it a fortuitous set of circumstances (specifically her dad’s connection to Brazilian club soccer management and family that lived under an hour from the relevant facilities) that led to Tordin spending a couple weeks training with Palmeiras, a professional team in São Paulo, Brazil.
“That’s when I got the first hint of what professional soccer could look like and the lifestyle of a professional player,” she says. “With more information, I was like, ‘Wait, I can strive for this. I can play professionally.’”
Later that year, as a sophomore with the Princeton Tigers, Tordin scored 12 goals in 18 games—the second best in the Ivy League. She played for both the Brazilian and U.S. under-20 squads. (She has dual citizenship.) By her junior year at Princeton, she led her team in scoring—and people noticed.
Among those people was Thorns midfielder Jessie Fleming. “I just like the way she plays,” Fleming told WW last year. “She’s really gifted technically and is a very smart football brain. She comes in, goes about her work, works really hard. I’m excited to see her progression.”
Portland’s front office took note, too. In January 2025 the Thorns announced that they’d signed Tordin to a contract through 2026, with an option for 2027.
Tordin was pragmatic about her expectations with the club. “My mentality going into things is to always give my best and give my 100%,” she says. “At the end of the day, that’s always going to be enough.”
And in 2025, it was. Tordin tallied four goals in league play that year—the third best on her team and the second best record on goals per 90 minutes played—and another against Mexican side América. She showcased her technical prowess on the ball and her vision on the pitch. She was named NWSL Rookie of the Month twice for her efforts. And she spent several months that year playing through a stress fracture in her left foot, an injury that kept her in a boot when she wasn’t donning cleats (or boots, if you will) on the pitch. (When WW asked about how the stress fracture influenced her season, it took Tordin several seconds to remember that she had, in fact, been injured last year.)
Still, the metrics don’t mean everything to Tordin, even with her hot start to the season. She doesn’t take to the field every day in hopes of winning an award or building a grocery list of championship titles.
“I feel like a lot of that stuff is biased to a certain extent, and I don’t like to measure myself based off of society’s biases,” she says.
“At the end of the day, I ask myself if I gave it my all that day,” she continues. “And if the answer is yes, I pat myself on the back and do it again tomorrow.”
