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Caiya Hanks wasn’t jumping for joy when the final whistle sounded across Providence Park on Sept. 6. Nor was she beaming as she had after the Portland Thorns’ victory over the Orlando Pride in August.
But she was on the field with her team as they made their lap around the stadium, waving to fans and taking in the applause after a tough result.
It was, overall, a solemn affair. The Thorns had just lost their first home match of the season, falling 2–1 to the Washington Spirit despite starting with one of their best halves of a soccer match all year. Portland floundered for much of the second half.
So it surely wasn’t the game Hanks wanted. But Thorns head coach Robert Vilahamn was still glad to get her on the field for that full second half, her first 45-minute stint since the ACL tear that kept her from the pitch for 14 months.
After such a long absence, Vilahamn was inclined to take the long view. “Having her back getting more minutes is good for us because she’s an investment,” he said in the postgame presser. “Every time she plays now, she grows with her confidence and her fitness level.”
Most Thorns fans can tell the story: Hanks was having a stellar start to her rookie campaign. She was a highly sought prospect coming out of her junior year at Wake Forest University. (The National Women’s Soccer League didn’t conduct a draft in 2025, but if it had, former Thorns coach David Gale says Hanks would have been the No. 1 pick.) She’d tallied two goals and one assist in 11 league games and was a couple of days from earning a call up to the U.S. women’s national team, according to All for XI reporter Phuoc Nguyen.
Even in those early days, Portland felt like home. “It’s such a proud organization and it’s such a proud club,” Hanks says. “Everyone who has come to play here plays with such pride and such integrity and strength and courage.”
And Hanks sees that the Thorns’ supporters carry that pride, too.
“It’s just phenomenal,” she says. “Where else would you want to be?”
Then came the fateful day in June 2025. That match last year was one I’d been anticipating; it was both the Thorns’ Pride match and my birthday. What happened next certainly wasn’t on my wishlist.
Hanks went down in first-half stoppage time. It didn’t look good.
Neither was the diagnosis: Hanks had torn her ACL and would miss the remainder of her rookie season.
“It was a very hard 14 months,” Hanks said in a press conference after she returned to play (and scored the game-winning goal against Orlando) in August. “To be honest, there were times that I didn’t even want to show up.”
But she wasn’t alone. She had her teammates on the Thorns, the medical staff, and former teammates from her time at Wake Forest who had gone through ACL tears of their own.
“The process is long,” Hanks says. “It’s just the same. It’s boring, it’s monotonous, and it’s hard to get up and want to go and do it.”
Her Demon Deacon friends told her to embrace that boredom and that there would be days when it got better.
“I just trusted that,” she says.
To keep herself entertained, she picked up hobbies. She started reading a lot (midfielder Olivia Moultrie was equipped with book recommendations and copies to lend and got Hanks into Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy novels), she painted, she wrote. And she leaned on her teammates, even when she couldn’t be on the field with them.
“It’s been tough, but I think the support system that I had was just incredible,” she said after her return to the field in Orlando. “When I felt like it was hard for me to do it for myself, I was like, ‘Oh, I can do it for them and do it for the people who want to see me back,’” she said.
Even in her recovery, she wasn’t alone. Hanks rehabbed alongside fellow wingers Morgan Weaver and Julie Dufour, who were recovering from knee injuries.
Hanks and Weaver, especially, bonded during that time, helping each other through the highs and lows of rehabbing a major injury as a professional athlete.
“She knows me like the back of her hand now,” Hanks says. And vice versa. By the end of their rehab, Hanks could finish Weaver’s sentences when her teammate was tongue-tied with trainers.
Weaver’s not the only player Hanks has grown close to. “We have such a great group of girls, and it’s such a great staff,” she says. “I just love to be here, and I think that’s why I have so much fun.”
It shows in the way Hanks plays on the pitch: fast and decisive with the ball and often with a smile on her face.
“Having Caiya back is like having a little firecracker back on the field,” defender M.A. Vignola said in the postgame presser on Sunday. “We missed her.”
