BALTIMORE, Md. – Their first hours in Baltimore, Maryland, would have felt like a whirlwind if Portland Thorns FC's staff wasn’t used it. But after years around the NWSL, this has become their late-January routine, one that usually involves a cross-country flight on Tuesday, a few hours of meetings that night, and an obligatory social scene – a league’s worth of contacts, assembled in one place for the only time in 12 months.
It all primes the pump. What lies ahead are three days that could make or break teams’ offseasons.
The annual NWSL College Draft falls in the middle of that stretch.