Olivia Moultrie made scoring the first goal of the 2026 NWSL season look easy.
With a slight tap of her right foot, the 20-year-old Portland Thorns midfielder barreled through the Washington Spirit's backline. This created a perfect opening for Moultrie to slice the ball past Spirit goalkeeper Sandy MacIver , who is starting her first season as the No. 1 in net, and score.
The sellout crowd of 19,215 at Audi Field fell silent. Moultrie and the Thorns rejoiced.
"There has been a lot of uncertainty" heading into the new season, Moultrie said after the game. But that didn't keep the team from thriving. "There will be things that we will sharpen up, but we really just showed up for each other, and that's what got us through this game."
The Thorns started the 2026 season where their 2025 season ended, at the Spirit's stadium in front of a sellout crowd known as "Rowdy Audi." Last fall, Portland fell to D.C. 2-0 in the NWSL semifinals, as Washington progressed to its second NWSL final in two years.
However, the Thorns' gritty 1-0 win on Friday night set the pace for what could be a promising season after a year of transition. It showed that, at least for now, the pieces that had seemed just out of reach last year are slotting nicely into the club's 2026 puzzle.
Nine days before the start of the season, the Thorns announced the hiring of former Tottenham Hotspur Women manager Robert Vilahamn on March 4 after running all of preseason under interim coach Sarah Lowdon and assistant coach Vytautas Andriuskevicius . While the Thorns have the most NWSL Championships in the league, they have not won the trophy since 2022.
"They have handled it in a way where they didn't know who was coming in from the beginning, to actually train (the players) quite neutrally to make sure they can be ready for this. I'm so impressed by that," Vilahamn said after the win.
The 43-year-old Swede had not even been to Portland to meet the team in person ahead of Friday's game. He traveled with "three big suitcases" to D.C. by way of Sweden , Amsterdam and Paris , battling flight delays to get to his team 48 hours before kicking off the season. He said he was "mainly just watching" as his assistant coaches put their plan in place.
Once Vilahamn began communicating with the coaching staff, he gave them his game model and they began comparing notes, the coach said. They found a way to integrate their philosophies and spent the last few days focusing on their game plan for the season opener against the Spirit. Their plan worked.
The coaching journey was not the Thorns' only obstacle going into the game. Portland was also without its usual starter in goal, with Mackenzie Arnold on international duty with Australia and Bella Bixby on the season-ending injury list due to a left knee injury sustained during preseason. Goalkeeper Morgan Messner secured a clean sheet on Friday in her NWSL regular-season debut.
One piece that has gone to plan, so far, was the long-awaited return of U.S. women's national team standout Sophia Wilson . After not featuring for the Thorns at all last year because she was growing her family, Wilson made her triumphant return to the pitch in the 78th minute. It was her first regular-season game since becoming a mother.
"That was a wild game to come into," Wilson said, "but it was a very big win for us."
Though she was only on the field for 15 minutes, Wilson showed glimpses of the "old Soph" with flashes of the new. Her interplay with Moultrie did the same.
"Honestly, once she stepped on the field, I'm like, 'Oh, we're back,'" Moultrie said. "It didn't feel like we had lost all this time."
While Moultrie and Wilson have played together as teammates on the Thorns since 2021 and the USWNT , Wilson has never played with this version of Moultrie, and vice versa.
"I'm a different player than the last time she got to play with me," Moultrie said. "That's really exciting because I feel like we'll just both be able to offer each other more than we were able to before — and hopefully that yields a lot of goals back and forth."
Although only 20 years old, Moultrie has been in the league since she was 13. She has since forged her way in the NWSL, and more recently into U.S. head coach Emma Hayes' regular rotation. She is also a serious contender for the 2027 World Cup roster.
"Liv has just taken off. She's been so fun to watch and the goal that she got in this game was so big and we needed it and she stepped up," Wilson said. "She's a great player, so I'm excited to keep that relationship going."
This article originally appeared in The Athletic .
US Women's national team, Portland Thorns, NWSL
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