Yes, we Vil have a Coach

I mean: what just happened with our long, slow winter?

The 2025 Portland Thorns finished in 3rd place in the league. An incredibly strong result — but, considering how the team got blown out in the NWSL Semifinal, there was still a meaningful canyon between Portland and a championship. By immediately firing coach Rob Gale, and then announcing the big-budget one-year extension with Sophia Wilson, the Thorns started this offseason showing exactly the ambition and edge needed to vault over that canyon, and into true contention.

And then: nothing. Portland’s head coaching role remained vacant — or, rather, assistant Sarah Lowdon is listed as an “Interim Head Coach” on the website — for 99 aimless days.

It was a gap of time that stretched out far longer than the players’ own offseason. For well over a month, Lowdon has led the team through a training camp in Santa Barbara, and now-traditional preseason games in the Coachella Valley (more on those preseason games later this week). With Lowdon’s years of experience in the Thorns’ organization, and previous tenure as an interim head coach for the Houston Dash during the 2023 season, Lowdon is absolutely a viable candidate to be an NWSL head coach. But, there was never any sort of noise that such a promotion was coming — giving the entire offseason a stifling, stale-air feeling to it.

In the end, 99 days is a shocking length of time for a major, 21st-century sports team to leave a head coaching seat vacant. It especially doesn’t make sense for the 2026 Thorns: with Portland’s intense home crowd, and the addition of one of the world’s best players to a playoff-caliber roster, this should be one of the very most attractive head coaching jobs across all space and time in women’s soccer history. Leaving a head coach seat empty that long feels like a bizarre trivia fact from the world of sports in the 1920s. In the 2020s, it would be cause for concern if a medium-to-large high school left a program leader-less for 99 days.

Okay, sheesh, we’re still not quite done with the oddities here. Vilahamn was appointed as Thorns coach almost one week ago, and all we have is a quick write-up on the Thorns’ website — with no evidence of the man across the team’s many social media pipes. My blind guess is that a skippable phrase from the write-up — “pending receipt of his P1 visa” — is delaying Vilahamn’s ability to arrive in Portland. It’s not a great feeling, considering Vilahamn was hired with just ten days before the first regular season game, each of them valuable as gold. It’s more like we’re counting down the hours now before the team’s start — which is clear across the country in Washington, DC, by the way — this Friday afternoon.

It will be more valuable to hear Vilahamn in a press conference, when he can share his own ideas for how he plans to lead the 2026 Thorns. But, his background: born in Sweden, Vilahamn had a playing career from 2002-2015, mostly in Sweden’s minor leagues. This included a tenure, from 2009-2015, when he served as a very rare player-coach, which seamlessly led to his coaching career.

After six seasons working as a men’s coach in Sweden, Vilahamn arrived in the women’s game by being promoted within the organization at BK Häcken in 2021, from men’s assistant to women’s head coach. While not a giant in the Swedish game, BK Häcken can boast national championships in both the men’s and the women’s leagues in this decade. Although Vilahamn did not lead the women’s team to a championship, he coached well enough that he was poached away by England’s Tottenham Hotspur in the summer of 2023.

Vilahamn’s two full seasons with Hotspur were, honestly, a mixed bag. The team finished 6th overall in the 2023-24 season (England’s soccer season goes from fall-to-spring, giving us the two-year thing). Then Tottenham slumped to 11th overall, in a 12-team league, in 2024-25. Vilahamn was fired after the end of that season, leaving him as not exactly a hot commodity in the coaching market.

Now, in Europe, there can be some pretty shocking disparities between the amount of money spent by different teams in the same league. Was Vilahamn not given a roster that could honestly compete against England’s best? And, in general, what did he learn from that experience that will change his coaching as he leads the Thorns?

This is why it will be so important to actually hear from the man. Still, it doesn’t feel the best that, after such a long winter of silence, the Thorns are not receiving a coach who is launching their way into Portland off the momentum of recent success. Either way: it wasn’t Vilahamn’s plan to hire himself so late this offseason, and some sort of grace period is unfortunately going to be necessary as he scrambles to get up to speed.

We’ll see what happens, but: this is not your recommended offseason recipe for building a champion.

Unfortunately, the appointment of Vilahamn also officially confirms the NWSL has a problem with hiring coaches. With the arrival of Boston Legacy FC and Denver Summit FC, we now have a 16-team league. Incredibly: 12 of those teams are coached by Europeans, including an astonishing ten European men.* We currently have just one coach out of 16, Bev Yanez of Racing Louisville, who is a former NWSL player.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The WNBA has created a coaching environment which, simultaneously: could be a lot better, and is also miles ahead of the NWSL. With 15 WNBA teams currently running in 2026, we have eight men and seven women head coaches. (Women coaches have also won the last four WNBA championships.) Out of the seven women, three of them were former WNBA players, meaning the other four women coaches had only collegiate playing experience, in many cases for pretty small schools, before starting coaching careers. In the NWSL, Yanez is also the only American woman overall. This means coaching pipelines have also not been established from the NWSL to the collegiate game, or among the many Americans who move to Europe and elsewhere for their own playing careers.

It will only help the NWSL to be as proactive as possible about making sure that more American women, and former players, are coaches in this league. For one, you’d like to see NWSL teams have just a bit more confidence in the idea that, with so many decades of the USWNT as the clear all-time best national team — hey, maybe Europeans don’t have a monopoly on smart tactics with this game.

In reality, creating a more equitable coaching environment would take years of intentional programs and policies that reach active and retired NWSL players, getting them equipped for a transition into coaching. It will also take a much more stable emotional environment from NWSL ownership and front offices, who cycle through head coaches like loads of laundry. Only three NWSL teams enter this season with a head coach who has been in place for three or more seasons. That’s very quick-trigger firing even compared to the high-turnover churn of America’s other big leagues — you can’t blame NWSL players for not wanting to jump into this mess.

At the same time: it’s not possible that out of the hundreds of NWSL alumni, and dozens of USWNT alumni, only one former player has the passion, temperament, and skills to stay connected to the game as a coach. The coaching talent is out there, and everyone will benefit if the NWSL actually starts to find it.

*Mak Lind, the new coach of North Carolina Courage, was born in Lebanon, which is in Asia. Although Lind would eventually play 10 games for the Lebanese national team, the rest of his 20-year professional playing and coaching career took place in his adopted home country of Sweden. So, for soccer purposes, I’ll say that Lind has a European background. And, fun fact: Lind succeeded Vilahamn as the coach at BK Häcken.