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Cary Young is ready to see the Portland Thorns make a fresh start this Friday.
“I’m super excited to be back in the stands and scream and such,” he says. “It’s always fun.”
Young has been an active supporter of the Thorns since 2016. He’s seen plenty of highs and lows: three championship matches, a player-abuse scandal, and new ownership that promises a higher standard.
But Portland isn’t out of the storm yet.
“I think there’s some things to be optimistic about,” Young says of 2025, “and a lot of things that are uncertain.”
He can say that again. The team enters Providence Park this week off a season-opening defeat to last year’s top-scoring team, the Kansas City Current, and an offseason in which the Thorns really needed to blow everything up. Unfortunately, the explosion took some of their best players out along the way.
According to NWSL reporter Arianna Cascone, Portland’s current roster played only 44% of the club’s total minutes in 2024. That reflects the loss—due to either roster moves or retirement—of Thorns stalwarts like Christine Sinclair, Becky Sauerbrunn, Kelli Hubly and Meghan Klingenberg.
The league average? Seventy-five percent.
In fact, the Thorns are the only team with a current roster that played less than half their club’s minutes last year.
That stat line doesn’t include rostered players who are missing the year due to season-ending injuries. Losing a player with the heart of Morgan Weaver or the defensive prowess of Marie Müller or the work rate of Nicole Payne would’ve each been a blow for Portland on its own. (Who even needs knees, anyway?) That all three of them are ruled out for the season might have been the nail in the coffin for the Thorns—if that coffin weren’t then sealed by Sophia Wilson announcing she’ll miss the season on maternity leave. (If that name doesn’t ring a bell: Portland’s 2024 leading goal scorer and world-class attacker, who we once knew as Sophia Smith, got married to the other kind of football player, Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Michael Wilson, this offseason.)
Wilson’s first pregnancy is obviously exciting. And there’s never going to be a good time for a professional athlete to miss a season (see: Bella Bixby sitting out 2024 for the birth of her daughter and Portland’s ensuing goalkeeper crisis). But along with the season-ending injuries to Müller, Payne and Weaver in a season when the Thorns’ defense was already going to be up in the air due to player departures, the stork’s timing is comically unfortunate for Portland.
“As much as expectations are low for the season, we all want to see the Thorns competing to be at their best,” says Stephen Duncan, a regular attendee of Thorns games since the 2019 World Cup. “There’s some excellent players to watch. We’re still getting to see Sam Coffey and Hina Sugita and all these players. I’m looking forward to it, trying to maintain a positive attitude and enjoy the ride and see how players develop.”
We saw the first flashes of how that new roster could shake out on Saturday in Kansas City. Portland started a relatively new 11, featuring the Thorns debuts of Kaitlyn Torpey and Deyna Castellanos and professional debut of Jayden Perry.
“Naivety, at the start, cost us,” head coach Rob Gale said in his postgame presser. “The disappointing thing is, we didn’t make them earn their goals.”
Going up against a high-scoring team like Kansas City wasn’t helped by Portland’s new backline—another parallel to last year’s season opener against the Current.
That leads us to my first big question for the 2025 Thorns: Who will step up as a leader in defense?
The Thorns started one player who was a regular defender in 2024 in Reyna Reyes. In her third year with Portland, Reyes is the longest-tenured fixture on the Thorns’ backline, at the age of 24. But in women’s soccer’s trend of pushing fullbacks high, she’s not always going to be the one sticking back and corralling a backline. The Thorns’ best option in that area, offseason signing and NWSL veteran Sam Hiatt, is still working her way back from a knee injury she sustained last year, Gale said postgame. Once Hiatt is 90-minutes fit, it’s likely that role will fall to her. But the duty of being Portland’s defensive anchor could just as well go to Perry or the 22-year-old Isabella Obaze or—if she’s healthy—Daiane.
Portland’s midfield seemed it would be an area with fewer question marks, as the club returned most of its regular starters in Coffey, Sugita, Olivia Moultrie and Jessie Fleming. But in its early lineups, Gale seems determined to fit the entire quartet of central midfielders on the field at once, while playing a 4-3-3 formation. That meant Fleming starting on the wing against Kansas City—a role we saw Moultrie take on in Portland’s last preseason game against the Utah Royals.
After the Thorns’ loss to the Current, Moultrie spoke on the free-flowing nature of positions under Gale. Instead of saying a forward or a midfielder needs to be in a certain space, Moultrie said, the team is focusing on recognizing spaces they need to fill and inhabiting them, regardless of their position on a lineup.
It’s a philosophy that seems pretty solid on its surface. The question here is: Can Gale get everyone on the same page and build enough chemistry to turn that into a cohesive and creative team performance throughout the season?
And then there’s the question of goals. Specifically: Who will score them in Wilson’s and Weaver’s absence?
Gale seems to be taking the quandary in stride.
“I ask every player to score goals,” he said. “The beauty of team sport, the beauty of football, is it’s next player up. We have players with great potential across that front line.”
The target striker could be marquee offseason signing Deyna Castellanos—whom, I think, we’re all excited to watch after Saturday—or 2024 midseason acquisition Reilyn Turner or the rookies Pietra Tordin and Caiya Hanks. Gale said he wants to see more goals “by committee,” or from players in all areas of the field.
Moultrie, who put up five goals for the Thorns in 2025, looks to have stepped up to the call; she combined with Sugita for Portland’s lone goal against Kansas City.
“The way we want to play, it will come from multiple places, because we’re not targeting a specific thing,” Moultrie said after the match. “The way we interchange and rotate and move and are free with how we play. I do believe that goals will come from playing good soccer.”
Home Opener
vs. Angel City FC
Providence Park
7 pm Friday, March 21