Portland Cherry Bombs Fc Women

Snohomish United, Salmon Bay, Tacoma Galaxy, West Seattle Rhodies, Olympia and Bigfoot are the sides that turn up most often on the fixture list for Portland Cherry Bombs FC Women — a run of opponents drawn almost entirely from towns and neighbourhoods north of the Columbia River, in Washington State, rather than from anywhere near Portland itself.

The club plays in the USL W League, the pre-professional women's tier USL runs across the United States as a step toward the professional game. Cherry Bombs sit inside a regional pod built around clubs from the Puget Sound area, facing the same handful of Washington sides more than once across a season rather than travelling the length of the competition.

That pattern of opponents raises a question the club's name does not settle: whether "Portland" describes where Cherry Bombs are actually based, or simply where the club took its name before its fixtures pulled it north. Nothing in the record resolves it either way.

What comes through instead is a team defined largely by whoever stands across from it that week — Salmon Bay one fixture, Tacoma Galaxy the next, Olympia or Bigfoot after that — on whichever Washington ground the calendar happens to send it to.