How a Documentary Sells Portland’s Unmatched Women’s Soccer Culture
Stars like Megan Rapinoe and Christine Sinclair drove the University of Portland’s 2005 national championship, but a new film has agencies and festivals pushing the city’s potential World Cup future.
On the facade just above the supporters’ section at Providence Park in Portland, Oregon, there are only two retired numbers: Clive Charles’ No. 3 and Christine Sinclair’s No. 12.
Originally from East London and a fixture at both West Ham and Cardiff City, Charles played at what was then Civic Stadium as a defender for the original North American Soccer League incarnation of the Portland Timbers from 1978 to 1981. Sinclair spent 2013 through 2024 at Jeld-Wen Field/Providence Park with the Portland Thorns, winning three National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) titles and retiring as the team’s captain.
But two women’s soccer national championships at the University of Portland—including one in 2005 that’s the subject of a new documentary—led to Charles and Sinclair’s numbers hanging in Portland’s most hallowed soccer ground today—and the reasons they have so little company. When Charles wrapped up his career with the Timbers, he kicked around indoor soccer for a bit before a former Timbers teammate, Jimmy Conway, talked him into coaching at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon.
After three years—during which he also formed youth soccer club Portland FC in Portland—he was called up by the University of Portland Pilots to coach their men’s team. Three years later, he added the women’s team to his duties and not only excelled at both, but produced U.S. national team players including Tiffeny Milbrett, Kasey Keller, Steve Cherundolo, Shannon MacMillan, and Conor Casey. Oh, and a future Team Canada captain named Christine Sinclair.
Joe Kuffner lived a mile from the Pilots’ home stadium at Merlo Field and attended both men’s and women’s soccer games just as Charles’ teams were gaining momentum.
“My dad was a normal dad, but he was bringing his son to women’s soccer games in 1990, 1991, at a time when that was not a common thing,” Kuffner said. “I’m so grateful for that because I grew up thinking that women’s soccer was a huge deal: I had those posters on my wall. I saw the thousands of fans in the stands…I was going to those games when I was 7, 8, 9, years old, those formative times, and seeing sold-out stadiums that really informed my appreciation for the sport of women’s soccer.”
Though diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000, Charles led Sinclair and the Pilots to their first women’s soccer championship during his final year as a coach in 2002. Charles died the following year, and when Sinclair played her last professional soccer match at Providence Park on Nov. 1, 2024, a sign held by a fan near the players’ tunnel read “Clive Would Have Been Proud.”
And there was a whole lot to see between Sinclair’s 2002 championship with the Pilots and her retirement from a soccer career that saw her captain Team Canada for almost 20 years (not including her time with Canada during the 2003 Women’s World Cup that saw Portland host six matchups, including the semifinals) and score 190 international goals—the most by any player in the sport. During her senior year at Portland in 2005, Sinclair set the all-time NCAA Division I scoring record with 39 goals—a mark that still stands—and took a team featuring a young, attacking freshman midfielder Megan Rapinoe to a 4-0 national championship win against UCLA. Rapinoe would score in the final, kicking off a career that led to an Olympic gold medal, two World Cup wins (with a Golden Ball and Golden Boot for her efforts in 2019), a Ballon D’or, equal pay for U.S. women’s players, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom for both her play and social advocacy.
Kuffner was on campus for many of the highlights, starting as a UP student in 2000, seeing the first national championship in 2002, and graduating the spring before the 2005 title game.
“By the nature of UP being a small school, I knew a lot of the players,” Kuffner said. “I had classes with them and I’d go to all the games… not to say that I was like great friends with people like Christine Sinclair or Megan Rapinoe, but they recognize me and I recognize them.”
I’m so grateful for that because I grew up thinking that women’s soccer was a huge deal: I had those posters on my wall.
Joe Kuffner, documentary filmmaker
Kuffner saw a throughline from the University of Portland women’s teams he grew up watching to the city’s women’s soccer present and, alongside a team of filmmakers, began creating a documentary about the 2005 championship team Unmatched: The Team That Changed The Beautiful Game. With portions of the film already previewed at film festivals and marketing agency sports events, Kuffner sees an opportunity to not only tell the story of Portland women’s soccer fandom, but share how the city built itself into a women’s sports destination for fans and brands alike.
“Portland supports women’s soccer unlike anywhere else in the country and that started back in the ‘90s, but that 2005 team supercharged it,” Kuffner said. “What the Thorns have done going forward is amazing—the NWSL might not have made it if it wasn’t for the Portland Thorns—and that’s a story that we’re excited to help tell.”
The city that shows up
While the 2005 championship was the last title the University of Portland would see, that season kicked off a 10-year stretch during which the Pilots were the top women’s soccer draw in the United States and were regularly packing their nearly 4,900-seat home at North Portland’s Merlo Field—located on what is now the Clive Charles Soccer Complex. The Pilots’ 3,771 average attendance from 2007 remained a record until 2023, while its total attendance of 47,082 in 2008 has been eclipsed just twice since (by BYU in 2012 and 2023).
By the time the Pilots’ average attendance streak ended in 2015, the NWSL’s Portland Thorns had already won their first title and had watched crowds grow from roughly 13,000 per match to more than 16,000. Not only would the Thorns eventually average more than 20,000 fans per game, but they’d lead the league in attendance for the better part of a decade and set the entire city’s expectations for its place within women’s sports.
Portland was different because of what Clive built way back in the early ’90s: People were fans of women’s soccer.
Joe Kuffner, documentary filmmaker
“The secret that I have uncovered in reporting and working on this documentary is that everybody remembers the 1999 World Cup…Brandi Chastain ripping her jersey, they sold out the Rose Bowl, it was a huge thing, but it didn’t last,” Kuffner said. “Portland was different because of what Clive built way back in the early ’90s: People were fans of women’s soccer.”
Kuffner got a front-row seat to Portland’s soccer growth using his early filmmaking skills to make commercials for the University of Portland’s news and content department after graduation. It wasn’t until he was working for his own media consultancy in 2023 and creating fundraising documentaries for the Providence Foundation’s cancer-fighting efforts that he began thinking of the 2005 championship team again.
In 2023, both Rapinoe and Sinclair announced the end of their international playing career. Kuffner thought back to their time at UP and games that sold out in six minutes, victory parades in downtown Portland, front-page news on The Oregonian and full segments on local news sports coverage.
Along with partners Ariane Kunze, Zach Putnam, Caitlin Crowley, Sarah Perez, and the Oregon Media Lab’s Jackie Weissman and Jen Kramer Tate, Kuffner began culling materials, conducting interviews, and assembling the documentary’s first clips and segments. In August 2025, creative agency INDUSTRY featured a trailer as part of its Groundbreakers Portland soccer event that also included a panel discussion with former Pilots coach Mick Hoban and a pop-up from former UP women’s coach Jim Tursi’s Tursi Soccer.
After Kuffner’s team secured an interview with Jenny Nguyen, founder of Portland’s women-focused sports bar The Sports Bra, Nguyen and her partners at the newly launched Independent Women’s Sports Film Festival invited the crew to preview their documentary during the May 2026 event. In July, during Portland Arts Week, Portland advertising and marketing agency Rain hosted an exhibit that included the documentary, original artwork, and memorabilia at The Writer’s Block gallery.
Kuffner and his crew are still filming and editing the remaining segments and portions of the documentary, but they’ve already received support from the University of Portland, a grant from Oregon Film, the Amplify Portland Grant from the Portland Events and Film Office, a Portland Regional Arts and Culture Council grant and the backing of Elise Taylor Liburd, a former soccer player and Warner Brothers casting assistant who now serves as film industry project manager for Prosper Portland.
While the Pilots women’s championship teams and huge soccer crowds are a story Portland understandably wants to tell, they’re also a reminder that the city’s place in women’s soccer was borne in a time when Gus Van Sant was still making films there about hustlers and illegally built skate parks, band members from Bikini Kill could live in town for little, and its high-end Pearl District was still rising out of warehouses and rail yards.
“When we tell people who are civically minded who were here during that time, I think people really get it,” Kuffner said. “They see it as something bigger than just ‘this was a great team in 2005.’”
Finding the epicenter
In recent years, women’s soccer served as a catalyst for women’s sports growth within Portland itself.
In 2022, The Sports Bra women’s sports-focused sports bar—the first of its kind in the world—opened on Portland’s Broadway. Founder Jenny Nguyen still counts the Thorns’ championship run from later that year as one of her top moments in the bar’s history.
In 2023, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden invited WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert to The Sports Bra to discuss bringing a professional women’s basketball team back to Portland for the first time since 2002. This year, the Portland Fire played its first WNBA season back in the city after being awarded a franchise in 2025, owned by the Thorns’ parent company RAJ Sports.
This summer, the Major League Baseball-supported Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL) established its Portland Cascade franchise in the city’s western suburbs. All of the above had a presence this year during Epicenter Week, an event held in Portland by RAJ Sports and Nike.
More recently, Portland announced its bid to host 2031 Women’s World Cup Matches, with the Bhathal family behind RAJ Sports leading the way.
The secret that I have uncovered in reporting and working on this documentary is that everybody remembers the 1999 World Cup…but it didn’t last. Portland was different.
Joe Kuffner, documentary filmmaker
But Kuffner and his team want fans and brands alike to know just how much work went into the city’s women’s soccer and sports culture. What it meant to the University of Portland for Charles to keep Tiffeny Milbrett closer to her Hillsboro, Oregon, home rather than let U.S. national team coach Anson Dorrance add her to an impressive squad at North Carolina. What it meant to women’s soccer for Charles to demand equal resources for Pilots men’s and women’s teams.
What it meant to the city to have 5,596 fans show up on Oct. 10, 1992 to watch Mia Hamm, Cindy Parlow, and Tish Venturini destroy the Pilots 6-1… but showcase some of the best talent in the game. Also, what it meant to Charles to not have his players subjected to the inequities and abuses he frequently experienced throughout his playing career as a black player on predominantly white teams.
“Under his watch, he wasn’t going to make any of the players he was coaching feel less than, not equal to, or not good enough,” Kuffner said. “If he was coaching them, he was going to treat them equally, and I think that carried through.”
Through making the documentary, Kuffner and company discovered that Sinclair—who won an Olympic gold medal for Canada in 2021 and multiple championships across women’s soccer leagues—still considers her championship-clinching overtime goal for Charles’ 2002 Pilots team the best thing she’s done on a soccer field. They also came to realize that the fans, city, and sport that, Charles, Sinclair, Rapinoe and the other members of the Pilots women’s team touched along the way brought a genuine sense of pride to Portland’s role in supporting women’s soccer.
With a FIFA Women’s World Cup coming to Brazil in 2027 and Netflix securing the streaming rights in the U.S.—and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles following immediately afterward—Kuffner and the Unmatched team are still attempting to get the documentary in front of as many fans as possible. Tate and Weissman have been working with contacts in Los Angeles and Kuffner has vowed to be more active on social media as the documentary finds a home. But as the documentary comes together and he hears more audiences discuss the 2005 Pilots, Kuffner sees increasing opportunities to reach audiences beyond the sport.
“It’s not just a sports story, it’s a Portland story,” Kuffner said. “Originally it started with Megan Rapinoe and Christine Sinclair, these two icons, but we very quickly came to understand that the city of Portland and the fans of Portland are a huge part of the story—a main character in some ways—even beyond those stars, because this wasn’t happening anywhere else.”
