PORTLAND, Ore. – Less than an hour after the Portland State Vikings college football team defeated Idaho State 45-20 at Providence Park on Saturday night, the stadium grounds crew was already out in force, wiping off the football lines and preparing the field for Sunday's 2016 NWSL Playoff match between Thorns FC and the Western New York Flash (2pm PT, FS1, Presented by Tillamook Ice Cream).
When the Thorns take the field, few traces will remain of that college football match. And while the grounds crew deserves much of the credit for that, some of the credit is also due to a dedicated crew of the Rose City Riveters—the Thorns FC supporters group.
That crew includes longtime Timbers Army and Rose City Riveters members Heidi White.
“I love watching the changing over from one [sport] to the other, just the logistics of getting it done – and the machines fascinate me as well,” White said of the stadium cleanup, pointing across the field towards the crew members scrubbing away the 20-yard marker and slowly erasing the fifty-yard stripe.
It was White who first brought the idea of helping out with the final changeover of the Thorns' season to the Timbers Operations staff.
“Hey, how many Rose City Rewards to get on field crew?” White had joked with a staff member referencing the club's popular annual membership rewards points program.
But White's idea became a reality after the Operations staff came around to her audacious proposal. The club’s senior VP of Operations, Ken Puckett, even asked White if any other members of the Riveters would want to participate and when White brought the idea to her fellow supporters the response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic.
“Everybody said, ‘Yeah, we [want to participate]!’”
Why White and over a dozen other members of the Riveters would want to come out to the Park on a cold, wet autumn night just to scrub gridiron lines off the field might seem perplexing to some, but for dedicated fans like White, the calculus is simple.
“This is hallowed ground for us,” White said of Providence Park. “This is our cathedral, our church. It's being invested in the process.”
It's also the night before the Thorns' biggest match of the season: the first home playoff match in franchise history.
But White admits that she prefers operating behind the scenes like this, preparing tifo and cleaning up the field before the match, doing the kind of work that garners little notice and few accolades from all but the most knowledgeable fans.
“I'm not really into being in front of a whole bunch of people,” White explained, referring to her wife Sunday's animated leadership from the capo stand. “[That's] not really me. But this sort of thing – this, I love.”
