The Portland Thorns are restructuring their technical department, making head coach Mike Norris their new technical director, following the club’s worst start to an NWSL season. Portland is currently in last place, having only managed a single point through the first four weeks of the 2024 season with a 0-1-3 record.
Advertisement
Rob Gale has been named interim head coach. Thorns general manager Karina LeBlanc told The Athletic the team will conduct a global search for Norris’ full-time replacement. There is no timeline for that hire yet, as LeBlanc expressed the need for the team to get it done correctly, not quickly.
LeBlanc said multiple times the club feels the technical director role is one that Norris will succeed in, and that he has the club’s full support as they restructure. While Norris has had less success this season, last year after he took over from Rhian Wilkinson following her resignation, the Thorns were one win away from the NWSL Shield and made the playoffs (defeated in extra time by eventual championship winners Gotham FC).
“The results have not gone our way, and in a head coach position, the results do matter,” LeBlanc said on Tuesday afternoon. “But the results that we have, you can’t just pinpoint it on one position.”
LeBlanc said the front office and the team’s new owners, the Bhathal family, believes in the roster and the processes they have established, but the club needed to add a technical director for further growth and to ensure they would compete with the rest of the NWSL.
LeBlanc rattled off some questions that the Bhathals and the club’s staff had been asking themselves. “Where can we grow? Where are the gaps? How do we move forward with being the standard that people are used to with the Thorns? One of the key roles identified was a technical director position.”
Ultimately, the decision makers felt they already had an ideal person to fill that role in Norris, one that would suit him more and keep him within the organization. They valued Norris’ institutional knowledge, including the team’s tactical approach, their positional profiles, their scouting and analysis, and his understanding of the NWSL itself. “He’s a processor,” LeBlanc said. “He’ll be up in the stands. One of his strengths is to analyze and process, then come down to communicate what needs to happen.”
Advertisement
At the same time, LeBlanc understood that with the rough start to the season, they needed to “shift.”
The Thorns have particularly struggled defensively and in allowing early goals. Their primary goalkeeper, Bella Bixby, is missing the start of the season due to pregnancy. While the Thorns haven’t allowed the most goals in the league, they’re just behind the Houston Dash (-5) with a -4 goal differential, and three places below them on the standings in last. The two teams will meet this weekend at Providence Park.
The good news for the Thorns is that while they’re currently in last place, it’s still only April and there’s time to make up spots in the table — plus, eight of the league’s 14 teams will make the playoffs this season.
Gale, now tapped to be interim head coach for the foreseeable future, joined the club as an assistant coach before the 2023 season. Prior to his role with the Thorns, he was a youth coach in NYCFC’s academy system, head coach and GM of a Canadian Premier League team, and a youth coach in Canada’s women’s national team program.
Captain Becky Sauerbrunn expressed both frustration and hope after Saturday’s loss to North Carolina.
“It’s hard to find a lot of encouraging things, but what I find encouraging is that people are frustrated,” she said postgame. “People are pissed off that we’re not doing well. We care, and I think that’s really important. So everyone after this game is going to look at themselves — and there’s going to be no finger pointing — we’re going to look at ourselves and figure out what we should have done, or what I should have done better.”
Norris himself had addressed the pressures of the head coach role this past weekend following the loss. “The pressure’s there from day one, when I got the job. I cannot be driven by my day-to-day and the longer vision of the pressure of the job. We’ve got a belief in how we want to play, how we want to operate. We’ve got to stick with the process of that. While we do it, we have to review and see what is working, what’s not working.”
Advertisement
A “shift,” as LeBlanc called it, was necessary for the Thorns, however. The decision to move on from Norris as head coach wasn’t solely down to the historical standard set by the team and how abnormal this start was. It was also influenced by the sale of the team to the Bhathal family earlier this year. Having paid $63 million for the team and committed to further investments, such as a training facility, it’s fair to expect more than 14th place.
“When we’re having these discussions,” LeBlanc said of the Bhathals, “they’re like, ‘This is not where we want it to be.’ … We’ve got to go out and get one of the best coaches in the world. Rob Gale may make that decision hard; he has an opportunity to do that. But we’re going to do that global search right.”
On Tuesday, LeBlanc said that making the decision to restructure the technical staff had been a painful one, but with Norris accepting the technical director role, hopefully one that would change the fortunes of the season so far.
“We have a game against Houston coming up at home. This is the time for the shift,” LeBlanc said. “Some may think the switch is too soon. Some may think it’s too late. I have to go with what we know internally. It’s still April, and we still have a talented squad.”
She was watching the players train from her office at that exact moment, and knew that the pressure of the early results was already turning into narratives around the team.
“I want the players to focus on the game,” LeBlanc said. “I want them to feel re-energized. But they still have that belief in themselves, and that’s the most important thing.”
GO DEEPER
Thorns' new ownership contributed to Sophia Smith's decision to stay in Portland
(Photo: Troy Wayrynen-USA TODAY Sports)
