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O Christine Sinclair! our Captain!
Twelve years with the Portland Thorns are over just like that. Sinclair will don the red kit for her final league match Friday, where she’ll hope to help her team secure an NWSL playoff spot with a win over Angel City FC.
Beyond the results, however, the game will serve as a sendoff match for Sinclair: Olympic gold medalist, Canadian legend and scorer of the most international goals of any soccer player, ever.
She’s also an icon to the Portland soccer community. In fact, a significant part of the story of Portland soccer—from the University of Portland bluffs to a stadium in Goose Hollow—can be traced through Sinclair’s career. She played her college game for the Pilots, helping them to national championships in 2002 and 2005 and earning an array of individual accolades. As the only player on the Thorns’ inaugural 2013 squad who’s still with the team, Sinclair is also the longest-tenured Thorn; she leads the franchise in goals by a 40-goal margin, and she’s been with the club for all three of their league championships and the highs and lows in between.
“I love Portland,” Sinclair wrote in her memoir, Playing the Long Game. “I play for Portland. I love the fans, I love the Thorns’ organization, and I love everything about the city. I love representing it.”
Sinclair is also famously a private person. Even in her memoir, she shifts the focus more to the teams she’s been a part of rather than going into depth about her own life.
So, what better way to remember Sinclair than through the eyes of those who have joined her along the way?
One of Mackenzie Grover’s favorite memories is of standing with the Rose City Riveters in Portland’s supporters section cheering for Sinclair. “She looks over like she wishes she could drop into the floor,” Grover says. “She’s like, ‘Why are you paying attention to me? Yes, I did something incredible, but please stop looking at me.’”
For Avi, a longtime follower of the Thorns who first saw Sinclair play at UP, watching her play a full career in Portland has been a gift. “You feel better,” Avi says, “when you see her out there on the field.”
Former Thorns head coach Mark Parsons says that consistency and high level of play reflect the purpose Sinclair brings to practice. It was something that stood out to him in his first couple of days with the team in 2016—and it’s the first thing he brought up almost nine years later.
Throughout his six years with the club, Parsons had a go-to first lesson for attacking players working on their finishing: Watch Sinclair train.
“She’s a special, special player,” he says. “She’s a special, special person. But she’s got there through being world class in the basics and training with this work ethic that I haven’t probably seen in anyone else.”
Parsons saw the Thorns through a pretty successful run, to put it mildly. They came in first in the league in 2016 and 2021 and won an NWSL championship in 2017. But one of the moments that stands out to him most was Portland’s 2016 semifinal loss to the Western New York Flash in overtime. It was a wild, back-and-forth game at a sold-out Providence Park, with fans booing the referee for every missed call.
“There was probably five seconds left,” Parsons says, “and I felt like we were still going to win. And I felt like every player and every fan in the stadium believed that we were going to win.”
But the Thorns fell behind early in that match, and then the Flash doubled their lead. Right after the second goal, Sinclair turned to the defenders and asked them to pass the ball up to her. “I don’t remember what her words were, but it was, ‘Kick the fucking ball toward me, please!’” Parsons says. “We kicked it up the pitch. Sinclair went through, bang, scored an amazing goal and then just ripped toward the crowd. She was basically putting the team and that whole stadium on her back.”
Portland lost the match 4–3. Parsons says for the first and only time in his coaching career, he was at a loss for words. But Sinclair wasn’t. She told the team they needed to be classy about the defeat. Next year, she told the team, they were going to win it all. They did.
“I love how understated she is as a captain,” says fan Sunny Jaynes, who’s been following the Thorns since the team’s inception. But Jaynes said they also love the moments when Sinclair steps up in front of everybody, as she did when the Thorns returned to Providence Park to celebrate their 2022 championship win. Sinclair, at the mic, announced she’d be returning to the Thorns for the 2023 season, “to win a fourth one of those” (she pointed to Portland’s newest piece of hardware) “and fuck Seattle.”
“I loved that,” Jaynes said. “She’s fierce but still understated.”
Coley Lehman’s Sinclair moment is actually about their daughter, Daisy. “She was 3 when the league started,” they say, “and she always loved Christine Sinclair.”
After one game, Lehman says, Sinclair threw her cleat up to Daisy. An adult standing near Daisy caught it, and Sinclair gestured to Daisy until the shoe was in the right hands. Lehman and Daisy stayed later to get Sinclair’s autograph on the cleat. “Daisy slept with that boot for years,” Lehman says.
My personal favorite Sinclair moment is from August 2019, when fans of the Thorns and the Portland Timbers were fighting the Portland front office for the right to display the Iron Front logo—an anti-fascist symbol with roots in the resistance to Nazi Germany—in the stands. As she walked into the stadium that day, Sinclair was wearing a black T-shirt displaying the Iron Front, with a rainbow circle around it. It wasn’t a big, flashy statement, but it was a visible show of support for the club’s fans and for the anti-fascist message they were supporting.
That moment tells the story of Sinclair’s career: She didn’t want the spotlight, but she knew exactly what to do with it.
Next Match: vs. Angel City FC, 7 pm PT Friday, Nov. 1 at Providence Park.