A season ends in training
Olivia Moultrie will not kick another ball for the Portland Thorns this year. The club confirmed Tuesday that the 20-year-old midfielder tore the ACL in her right knee during a training session last week and has been placed on the season-ending injury list.
There was no collision, no rough tackle in a match. Just a routine session that turned into months of rehabilitation. For a player who has spent her whole young career sprinting ahead of the calendar, the timing bites.
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What Portland loses
Moultrie was in the middle of the best club campaign of her life. She had five goals and five assists in 16 appearances, 15 of them starts, and the Thorns sit fifth in the NWSL standings through 19 matches. Pulling that production out with the playoff race tightening leaves a hole Portland cannot easily patch.
“Olivia is one of the most driven players I have been around, and she will use that drive during her recovery and rehabilitation,” said Jeff Agoos, the club’s president and general manager of soccer operations. “She has our full support and every resource this club can put behind her.”
The national-team cost
The bigger picture reaches well past Portland. Moultrie made her United States debut in 2023 and has five goals in 18 caps, with winner’s medals from the 2024 Concacaf W Gold Cup and the SheBelieves Cups in 2024 and 2026. She was the 2023 U.S. Soccer Young Female Player of the Year, a label that stamped her as one of the faces of the next American generation.
An ACL reconstruction carries a long recovery, so she will miss the Concacaf W Championship in November and December. Her availability for the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup, which opens next June in Brazil, now hangs in the balance.
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