Another New Portland Women’s Sports Team Announced (Not the WNBA One)

While much fuss is being made in the Rose Quarter over Portland’s new WNBA team, another professional women’s sports team quietly debuted this week as well.

Say hello to the Oregon Soar, your new women’s professional ultimate frisbee team.

The Soar pick up where the Oregon Onyx left off, the women’s ultimate team that folded in 2023. Before that, there were the Portland Swifts, which ended in 2021. The Oregon Soar will play in the Western Ultimate League starting in spring 2025.

In choosing the name Soar, owners Darci Fredricks and Bill Freeman wanted to be rooted in the natural world while nodding toward the history of the team.

“We had all these starts and stops, so it was about rising above challenges and going into the airspace, which is so important in ultimate frisbee,” Fredricks says.

The Soar announcement comes in tandem with news that the men’s team, the Portland Nitro, will be rebranding to become the Oregon Steel for the 2025 season. Fredricks and Freeman (a married couple who met playing ultimate frisbee in college) purchased the Nitro in April.

“We wanted it aligned with Oregon and the natural world,” Fredricks says. “Nitro was energetic and fun but there wasn’t a super clear tie to Oregon, other than maybe coffee and beer. Steel comes from the native steelhead trout, a fish that swims together, fights together, wins together.”

The biggest challenge right now is finding the right field and stadium space to play in—it needs to have covered stands, team locker rooms, nice fields and, ideally, the ability to serve alcohol. (Family-friendly amenities, like a space for kids to play, are also important.) In 2022, the Nitro and Onyx both played at Providence Park but last year the Nitro held games at Kiggins Bowl in Vancouver.

Portland Nitro attendance was insufficient in 2024: a couple hundred people came to each home game, but it needs to be more like 750 to 1,000 fans, Fredricks says. The Steel will remain in the Ultimate Frisbee Association’s West Division.

The owners have also introduced the Oregon Ultimate Alliance, an umbrella organization to manage both the Steel and Soar, and are looking for team sponsors. Tryouts for the Soar begin in November.