This post was written by local student Mia Robertson as part of a high school journalism class. It is posted here with Mia's permission.
Walking towards Providence Park, I see people crowding the sidewalks. Some corners have orderly lines snaking towards the stadium doors, but at the intersection of 18th and Morrison there is more of a humming mass of people, swarming like ants on the concrete steps; in order to find your way into the stadium, you allow yourself to fall into the crowd and find yourself miraculously spit out at the security gate. Colloquially among my friends and family, this particular entrance to the stadium is referred to as the one with “the big metal face,” because of the sculpture on the street corner that we used to climb as kids while we waited for the rest of our group to arrive before we could enter. Today, it is a sweltering 85 degrees in mid-May, and the young kids climbing on the face today are restricted to the half creating its own shade, for risk of burning their hands on the overheated metal.
Eventually, the crowd crawls forward enough to allow us entry into the stadium, and we are pushed forward into the delightful ambiance of pizza grease and an ocean of red jerseys moving in all different directions at once. As we weave through the mass of fans and to our seats, I start to look past the annoyance of getting cut off by someone speed-walking to the Dutch Bros line. Instead, my eyes follow a woman getting dragged by her daughter, both in matching 2019 jerseys, towards the merch line with the newest design in her hands. There’s a whole girl’s youth soccer team in matching uniforms moving as a unit through the hall laughing and talking with each other. A little further down, I see a couple in an absurdly long line for nine-dollar hot dogs, making friends with the man standing in front of them because they both complained about the price.
When we finally reach our seats and the sun has set beyond the lip of the stadium, I truly remember why I love coming to Thorns games. It’s more than the joy of eating a whole bag of cotton candy in one sitting, but rather the anticipation of the starting whistle and hearing the group sitting behind you give their play-by-play commentary on the game–even when it’s entirely incorrect, in that they got both the names of the players and the rules of the game wrong. While the primary allure of a Thorns game is great soccer, I also go for the vibrant passion of the crowd.
On Saturday, May 11, during the match against the Seattle Reign, one of the Thorn’s long-standing rivals, there was a roaring audience of over 20,000 fans. They almost filled the Providence Park stadium, which seats more than 25,000 people. When the Thorns scored their first goal in the 42nd minute of the game, my mom’s Apple Watch notified her that she should find a quieter space soon because the sound levels in the stadium were over 96 decibels. A smoke bomb gets set off and scarves and flags fly; my entire section and I jump out of our seats screaming. The clouds of smoke diffuse through the air, wrapping the corners of the stadium lights in a red hue. Eventually, the sound levels out, but the chants don’t stop.
Figure 1: Photo of the Thorns Match vs the Seattle Reign after a goal was scored. (Robertson)
From my seat in the Key Bank Club section, I can see the North End clearly. Home of the Rose City Riveters, the general admission supporters section is where cheering stems from in the stadium. The aforementioned smoke bombs, themed chants and flags are all the handiwork of the Riveters, who also make massive painted banners called tifos which they display at the start of significant matches. They create an otherworldly display at every home game, but the reality is that many people, like myself, have gone to Thorns matches for years and have never really known who the Riveters are or the extent of what they do.
The Rose City Riveters are half of the 107 Independent Supporters Trust, a nonprofit organization with the mission “to support soccer in and around Portland, Oregon, from the grassroots to the highest professional level” (107ist). The group is named after section 107 in the Providence Park stadium, where the Riveters and the Timbers Army–supporters of the MLS soccer team the Portland Timbers, and the other half of the 107IST–sit, or rather stand, to cheer and wave flags during games.
Approximately seven minutes before halftime, I excused myself from the engaging conversation I was having with my mother about the number of players in the NWSL who have recently retired and the number of new additions to the team whose names we haven’t had the chance to learn yet. If I were to leave even a minute later, I would find myself stuck yet again in the influx of people trying to buy concessions before the game starts up–as it is, there are already a fair number of fans waiting in lines that span the width of the hallway in all of the annoying ways, hoping to beat the halftime rush.
Despite the human roadblocks, I managed to make my way from my seat and around the curve of the stadium halls to the general admission section to see what happens in the North End for myself. Although my family and I have sat on the periphery of section 107 on occasion over the six or seven years we’ve been going to soccer matches at Providence Park, I’ve never really been in the center of it all. Of course, the spectacle the Riveters create can be seen and heard from any corner of the stadium (that’s like, the whole point), but there’s something special about hearing the drums and the horns and seeing the mass of people march back and forth. It’s here that I can first understand why there are so many people dedicated to maintaining this space.
When I first started going to Thorns matches, I was around 8 years old and it was 2015. I remember that the cacophony of the crowd was less exciting than the game in front of me because I was a kid who played striker and goalie on my recreational team and the idea of playing soccer as a job was almost magical. It was much more than a soccer game for my young mind, it was a dream come true. At the time, I was entirely unaware of the great number of people in the crowd who remembered a time when the Portland Thorns didn’t exist and when women in America couldn’t play soccer at all.
The history of women’s soccer in the US began on June 23, 1972, the day when the Title IX law was signed, forbidding discrimination among educational programs on the basis of sex. This became the very foundation of women's sports in America and quickly sparked a dramatic surge in female athletic participation nationwide despite the lengthy amount of time given by the enforcement regulations to the schools to comply. However, soccer was not explicitly allowed by Title IX because of an additional clause detailing an exception to the rule: schools were not required to provide equal opportunities to girls in sports that were classified as contact sports, such as “boxing, wrestling, rugby, ice hockey, football, basketball, and other sports the purpose or major activity of which involved bodily contact.” In many states, girls were banned from playing soccer because it was believed they were weaker than boys and therefore in physical danger when participating in contact sports. Gender segregation in sports was rationalized because the government thought it was in their interest to protect girls’ safety in this way (Fields 309-312).
This idea was countered by Hoover v. Meiklejohn in 1976 when a high school girl from Colorado named Donna Hoover sued the Jefferson County Board of Education and the Colorado High School Activities Association because their rules stated that she was not allowed to participate in soccer as a girl in her state. She sued on the basis that her constitutional right of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment was violated because she couldn’t play, and she won. Soccer, although not deeply entrenched in American identity at the time, only grew with the aid of female participation allowed by Title IX and the equal protection clause. Around one hundred boys played organized youth soccer in 1964. By 1977, a little over ten years later, an estimated 500,000 children were part of soccer programs. (Fields 312-314) The history of soccer in the US started with little girls like me.
Beyond the youth levels, Title IX has created opportunities for intense growth in women's collegiate athletics, including soccer, opening avenues for greater visibility for female athletes and the potential for the development of professional competition. However, professional women’s soccer in the United States still traveled a rocky path after the success of Title IX. Before the National Women's Soccer League or NWSL, there were two failed professional women’s leagues in America. In 2000 there was the Women’s United Soccer Association, which had a relatively smooth start but was terminated three years after its first season in 2001 due to financial problems. Then there was Women’s Professional Soccer in 2008, operating on a smaller scale than the WUSA; the league got significantly less attention than its predecessor. Although they attempted a strategy of slower growth to maintain financial balance, the lack of viewership created the same lack of profit and the league also ended after three seasons. (Women’s Soccer History in the USA: An Overview) In 2012 the NWSL was born, and with its first season in 2013, the Portland Thorns began as well.
On their first home game on April 21, 2013, there were 16,479 fans in attendance. Even better, there was already a tifo greeting the players at the start of the match, created by the freshly dubbed Rose City Riveters, formed before the inaugural season with the help of the Timbers Army. When I spoke with Rachel Greenough–a member of the Rose City Riveters Steering Committee–about the beginnings of the group, she said, “Like a lot of what we do, it was grassroots, it was meeting in someone’s living room and hashing out what the name of the group was going to be.” Greenough said that from the start there were people who were deeply passionate about the Thorns, and that “It did kind of offshoot from the Timbers Army, but even from the beginning it was its own thing.” Since that first day, the Riveters have shown up for soccer in Portland in thousands of ways, and have curated their own unique identity.
Anyone can see that the Riveters are extraordinary from inside the stadium, with creative chants and hundreds of hands in the air clapping along with the drum beats. Outside of the stadium, however, their new building provides insight into the unique nature of the Riveters. The space used to belong to a business that attaches roof racks to cars, but has since been redesigned by hours of work from volunteers and people who are, according to Greenough, “deeply stuck in.” The new space is located on the corner of 18th and Morrison, diagonally across from the stadium doors I entered to watch the Seattle match. It’s open every matchday for a couple of hours but closes twenty minutes before the game begins so the volunteers running the registers have enough time to get to their seats. I received my own private tour of the space around a week before the game and saw firsthand the effort they were putting into it. The group member who said hello to me while fixing a light fixture atop yellow scaffolding as I entered the space on Thursday was noticeably absent in the brightly lit store bustling with customers and volunteers on game day.
Figure 2: An image of the Axe and Rose on gameday. (Robertson)
The Axe and Rose is most obviously a storefront for Riveter and Timbers Army designed merchandise that funds the majority of the 107IST’s activities. However, it also contains a meeting room for the steering committees outfitted with a green turf carpet and a TV at the end of the large table to coordinate online meetings–a necessary post-COVID addition. There’s also the tifo workspace up the stairs which neither Greenough nor I were allowed to enter because the first and second rules of tifo are “do not talk about tifo.” (107ist) Lastly, the majority of the building’s ground floor is taken up by a large garage area that currently serves as a storage space after the recent move. It will eventually turn into a community space for events on match days, something that was previously impossible due to the lack of space in downtown Portland. Greenough also hopes the event space could be used by community partners or for lectures and CPR training, which the organization periodically offers for members.
A big part of the Riveters is what goes on beyond gameday, and their efforts to bolster the Portland community outside of supporting the Thorns. One of the committees of the 107IST is a joint effort of the Timbers Army and the Riveters dedicated to community outreach. In the past, they’ve done match day donation drives, and every year the organization buys a few season tickets to donate to local nonprofits to use as fundraisers. Most of the community work they do is grassroots and built on the person-to-person connections that they have with many local organizations. Greenough seemed to feel a sense of pride in that people in the Portland community seem to know that the Riveters are “a group they can call on when they have a need, whether that’s a need for volunteers or resources or whatever.”
Many of the groups that they partner with are invested in supporting minorities in Portland. Although part of the Riveter’s identity is strongly rooted in their independence, they often collaborate along community lines to create a bigger impact. In July of 2023, they worked with the Timbers and Thorns Stand Together Coordinator Dr. Robin Beavers to create shirts designed by Meghan Klingenberg, a player for the Thorns. All of the sales of the shirts, printed with the words “I’m Here, I’m Queer, & I Cheer for the Thorns” and “I Support Queer Joy,” served as a fundraiser for New Avenues for Youth, a nonprofit founded “in response to the growing numbers of youth experiencing homelessness in downtown Portland” (New Avenues for Youth).
More recently the Riveters released their 2024 Pridraiser Campaign. They’re raising money for Outside In, one of the first free community health clinics in the United States. They provide healthcare for everyone, “regardless of their gender identity, insurance or immigration status, or their ability to pay” (New Avenues for Youth). This partnership isn’t out of character for the group, in fact, pride has always been a special event for the Riveters. A look at past tifos will reveal a consistent history of pride-related designs, often relating to whatever recent turmoil may be facing the national LGBTQ+ community or the group itself. Inside the Axe and Rose there are swaths of pride-related products available year round, and the back rooms are plastered with stickers proudly presenting taglines such as “black lives matter” and “end fascism.” You can find a trans flag hanging on the wall next to the trophy case that holds memories of fundamental moments for the Timbers Army, the Riveters, and their teams. An integral part of the Rose City Riveters is being a community that welcomes everyone. They have always made sure to use their power to stand up for those who need it.
When asked about the inclusive nature of the group, Greenough said, “I think it’s really self-perpetuating … That [being emphatically inclusive] is absolutely our ethos, and the people who stick around are the people who perpetuate that ethos and the people who want to be a part of that keep coming in.” In a sense, the Riveter’s advocacy is another way the importance of their independence as a group shines through. As Greenough puts it, “this is our home, this is the place we belong … There’s a real sense of ownership and passion for protecting that space and making it open to anyone who needs it.”
Sometimes that passion spreads into conflicts with the stadium or team management. In the past couple years, the Riveters have not shied away from defending their own rights as an independent supporters group. They also have been vehement in their fight for the rights of the players, especially regarding the recent NWSL abuse scandal, when former coach Paul Riley’s mistreatment of players was hidden from the public and other teams, allowing him to move to the North Carolina Courage and continue to use his position as coach to sexually harass players. In many ways, the Riveters are a force to be reckoned with, and they recognize that.
Not being tied to the front office is essential to the identity of the group. The Riveters are their own community, and similarly to how there’s no head authority from the Thorns management controlling their actions, there’s no one person who leads the group. It’s not about individuals, but rather collective work to support the team and soccer in the greater Portland area. However, their independence and collective mindset mean that it’s difficult to coordinate as a whole unit, and even more challenging to let outsiders know about who they are and what they do as a group.
There’s a whole stadium of people in Providence Park every week who have been watching Thorns games forever and have never fully known about the Riveters. And yet, record numbers of people still flock downtown and crawl through the crowds to attend Thorns matches. They go for the soccer, but they also go for the energy of the crowd, and the sense of home you feel when you enter the stadium. The Riveters have the beating heart of Portland soccer since the very first game in 2013.
When I sit, watching the Thorns score their fourth goal against the Seattle Reign and hear the crowd roar, I hope that the legacy of the Riveters will spread further throughout the NWSL, and the global football scene. There really is nothing like sitting in a crowd of people who love to watch a game of professional women’s soccer.
