On Sunday, February 21st, the Riveters will be hosting the second winter meet-up & volunteer recruitment event. This will be at Blitz 99 located at 10935 SW 68th Pkwy in Tigard from 11am – 1pm. We chose to do it early in the day, on a Sunday, to make it easier for folks who couldn’t get to the Thursday night meet-up earlier in the month. Also, the Timbers have a preseason match that evening, so hopefully there is limited conflict.

Come out to this meet-up if you want to connect with like minded fans and also if you’re interested in getting more involved in 2016. We are looking for a lot of new faces to join our efforts and will have committee members on hand to share info about what we do and answer any questions you may have.

If you cannot make it out to either of the meet-ups but still want to get involved, please add your information to one of the sign up forms below. You can sign up for as many committees as you would like. We will be in touch shortly after you sign up to let you know when the next meeting will be or ask about how you would like to get involved.

• Riveters Design Team
• Riveters Communications
• Riveters Sales/Membership Team
• Riveters Travel
• Riveters Capos/Drums/Trumpets

On Thursday, February 11, we’re holding the first of at least two preseason Rose City Riveters meetups and info sessions for prospective volunteers. This one will be at Bazi Bierbrasserie on SE 32nd and Hawthorne from 6:30-8:30pm. If you’re interested in chatting directly with subcommittee leads about the positions where we need help, come on down! In either case, come down to catch up with fellow supporters and meet new people.

We have signup forms online for open volunteer slots. Whether or not you can make it to one of the in-person events, we encourage you to fill out the online form for any position in which you’re interested:

• Riveters Design Team
• Riveters Communications
• Riveters Sales/Membership Team
• Riveters Travel
• Riveters Capos/Drums/Trumpets

Hope to see you there!

Thanks to those of you who were able to attend today’s 107ist Annual General Meeting. To cut to the chase, though: we need you! Here are the Riveters volunteer signup forms for this year:

• Riveters Design Team
• Riveters Communications
• Riveters Sales/Membership Team
• Riveters Travel
• Riveters Capos/Drums/Trumpets

As always, if you’re interested in painting tifo, the call will go out for help with individual displays when the time comes.

Feel free to email us with any questions you might have. Our committee leads expect to get back to all applicants within the coming weeks. 

Greetings and welcome to an unprecedented Year 4 from your 2016 Communications Critter and 107ist Board Liaison!

Along with the ascension of MarPar to the throne, the team looks to have been gifted with a MASSIVE infusion of fresh talent and energy this off-season. We’ve got at least a preseason schedule now, and we can’t wait to be doing more than following along with the domestic and overseas adventures of our Girls in Red, wildly speculating over Twitter, and thinking up fun banner ideas as we sort paint out in the garage.

Watch this space, Facebook, and Twitter for updates in the very near future. In the meantime, a couple of things I’d love from you:

• If you’re interested in receiving emails from us from time to time, sign up using the form on the right side of this page. We’ll send info on Riveters-centric events, volunteer opportunities, and other things you might want to know about as the year progresses.
• Send me an email with feedback about what you’d like to do as a Riveter and what you’d like to see the Riveters do this year. What’s working for you? What’s missing? What are you interested in but not sure how to do? How can you help, and how can we? If it’s not in my wheelhouse (which at this point chiefly consists of our social media presence and the website), I’ll make sure your feedback/question/suggestion gets to the folks in charge of your area of interest: info@rosecityriveters.org

Let’s make this the best year yet!

-Lexi

Consider this your formal invitation to come to Portland for the NWSL Championship final.

Portland is a pretty simple city for travelers. If you’re flying in just for a few days for the game, you don’t even need to rent a car. Providence Park (1844 SW Morrison) is conveniently located just a few blocks from the center of the city and is easily accessible by public transportation. Both the MAX light rail red and blue lines stop literally across the street and many bus lines have stops within a couple hundred yards of the gates. You can find a public transportation trip planner at Trimet.org. Trimet also offers a pretty handy app that lets you purchase your fare using a smart phone. A full day pass is $5 and will get you anywhere you need to go.

If you’re planning on driving to the stadium on game day, please note: there’s no parking lot. Parking is at a premium in the area with very few pay lots close by. Leave your car at the hotel/Air BnB or whatever and hop on a bus or train, or look for a Smart Park Garage in downtown. If you park after 5 p.m., it, too, is only $5 and several SP garages are close to the light rail lines.

There are lots of good hotels in the downtown core area, though they cater primarily to business travelers and aren’t cheap.

The Park Lane Suites and Hotel Deluxe are within lazy-people-walking-distance from ProPark, the big beige square on the left. This screen capture shows rates pulled from Google as of 9/13/15. They will likely change a dozen times over the next couple weeks. When searching for a hotel, you might also consider the Lloyd Center/Convention Center area. Most have on-site parking and are close to MAX light rail stops. Airport hotels may have lower rates as well, but be aware that rush hour traffic will be between you and the stadium on game day. Forgo the rental car and put that money into the higher-priced downtown hotel.

However, if you’re in town for the weekend, maybe pick up a car to get out of town and see some of the great Pacific Northwest. Mt. Hood and historic Timberline Lodge are roughly an hour’s drive to the east; Seaside, Canon Beach, and Astoria (where The Goonies was filmed*) are a bit more than an hour west.

Or, just stay in town. Portland is home to a significant food cart culture, dozens of breweries, tons of museums and galleries, and a bazillion things to do. Some things to check out:

Portland is home to what might be the only bar in the world dedicated to women’s soccer.

Take a tour of the downtown area and get to know the area with Portland Walking Tours.

We’ve got art!

You like werewolves? We’ve got those, too.

And, in case we hadn’t mentioned it before, we’re the City of Roses.

But you’re here for the soccer, aren’t you? Stick around and check out the University of Portland women’s team October 3 at Merlo Field. For many of us, women’s soccer begins with memories of the legendary Clive Charles. His legacy cannot be discounted.

Okay, so there’s your starting point for your NWSL Championship trip to Portland. We’ll update as we get closer and are looking forward to meeting all of you. Look for a Game Day Info post as we get closer to October 1st.

*When talking about travel to Oregon, it’s required that we mention where The Goonies was filmed.

I’ve been watching from a safe distance for months as the tifo crew went through the planning and testing and adjusting process for the end-of-season display. They are an intrepid group, a group that works harder than most will ever know.

Any late interest in Plan F: Rent a big disco ball and have it light up the rafters?

Ideas were proposed, discussed, changed, scrapped, reborn. There was an elaborate contraption made of pvc and connectors, a weather balloon, strings of LED lights that went unused.

Learned an unhappy lesson this afternoon – trim your fingernails before inflating a weather balloon.

Trial and error, opportunities for learning and laughing and growing and groaning. Brilliant 2 a.m. ideas faded in the light of morning and were replaced by even more brilliant ideas. People floated in and out of the discussion and then, at long last, fabric was laid out and paint brushes taken up and a beautiful thing happened.

Simple and elegant, it said so many things. By the time it was raised, the Thorns were already outside of the playoff picture but, despite a disappointing season, we still saw them as the Belles of the Ball.

They are the reason we do what we do. They are why we show up en masse. They are the catalyst for the magic that happens in the sometimes indecipherable minds of the tifo crew.

Is helium actually a need?

I look at the work that’s created by this group of folks and I know just how lucky we are to have them. Working with materials that have been salvaged from previous displays and often donating materials they’ve gathered, they create short-lived works of art for the express purpose of delivering a message to the players on the field and, perhaps to a greater extent, the world.

We support you, our beloved Thorns. We know this season did not go according to plan, but we’re still here. Let’s dance.

Okay. This is it. Last home match of the season.

The season hasn’t gone the way we’d have planned it, but here we are anyway. We’ve got one more chance to show our Thorns that we support them regardless of the result.

It’s a big day. Be on time. Don’t traipse in five minutes to kick-off. Bring your A-game. Also, maybe bring some rain gear.

We’ve got two Thorns retiring at the end of this season: Rachel Van Hollebeke and Nadine Angerer. We know the team plans to honor both pre-match, but why not don a jaunty hat for Nadine and maybe some scrubs for Rachel, who’s off to medical school any minute now? They’ve both been stalwart for both the Thorns and for their national teams and they will be greatly missed in the soccering world.

BUY YOUR CAPO A PINT. Actually, don’t. But do kick in a few bucks (those few bucks you would have spent on that pint) to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls. We’ll be passing buckets around for cash donations, but you can also go here and donate online. Summer session tuition this year was $400 per camper. We’d love to be able to sponsor one camper for each of our capos and drum corps members next summer.

RIVETERS PLAYER OF THE YEAR. We’ve got the trophy and we’ll be presenting it to our winner at the close of the match. We know you guys stick around anyway, but encourage your neighbors to do the same. All our players deserve recognition, but the winner has gone above and beyond this year.

As always, we’ll be at Fanladen pre-match with t-shirts, scarves and assorted whatnot, as well as 107ist membership services and ticket exchange. If you’ve got a spare ticket you won’t be using, you can donate it to the tifo fund by transferring it to ticketdonation@rosecityriveters.org. We’ve got a pretty fantastic tifo crew and we want to make sure their efforts are well-funded as we look toward the planning of the 2016 season.

HUGE DISCLAIMER: I posted a version of this last night on my personal blog. It’s my opinion, not the opinion of the Riveters as an organization (is there ever an opinion that covers all of us?).

The 2015 NWSL Championship will be held in our city, Soccer City, USA, and, in all likelihood, it will feature two teams not from Portland.

So, what happens here? I know there are some loyal Thorns fans who won’t be there if their team isn’t there to support. That’s fine. There are some who will be up on the Bluff, taking in the University of Portland match at Merlo. Nothing wrong with that, either.

I’ll be at Providence Park. I think it’s important to support a league still in its infancy, so I’ll buy a ticket and show up. I won’t be waving a flag and, unless someone comes up with something strikingly clever, I’ll probably stop singing after the anthem. I will cheer players who do well and I will congratulate the winning team.

People are discussing what role, if any, the Riveters should play. Should we take this as an opportunity to express our displeasure with the league, our coach, our underperforming players, with…what, exactly? Do we use it to elevate the other supporters groups in the league? Or maybe just those whose teams are still playing October 1st? There’s no true consensus.

A couple of us talked a day or two ago about taking up residence in section 223 for the Championship game. Visitors in our own home.

But meh. Let’s go to the South Deck. It’s nice to have a change of scenery once in a while.

With just a week to go before our final regular season home match, we’re launching BYCAP.

What’s BYCAP?

At the end of the year, folks get this wild idea that, out of admiration and/or gratitude, they should buy the capos a pint. This is a really great idea but, honestly, there’s no way they can drink that much and still remain functional through the game.

Instead, they’d like to funnel the money that would be used to buy them pints back into the community through a donation to the Rock & Roll Camp for Girls. Summer camp tuition this year was $400 per student. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could cover tuition for at least one student for each of our capos and drummers?

We’ll be passing buckets pre-match on Sunday (not necessarily on Sunday the capo, though she’ll *have* a bucket you can drop cash into) or you can donate by clicking here.

Hey, all. It’s that time again. As we approach our final regular season home match of the year, we’re thinking back over the contributions made by each of our players. The Riveters Player of the Year will be honored August 30 at Providence Park.

The survey is set to only accept one response from each computer so please discuss with family/roommates/opinionated pets before you make your choice. The poll will close Sunday, August 23rd at 6 p.m. (assuming I clicked all the right buttons and checked all the right boxes).