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It didn’t take long for Jackie Stiles to be recognized after returning to Portland, OR. Shortly after touching down in PDX this past winter, the former shooting guard, who called the city home for two years, elected to grab a quick drink to quench her thirst before meeting up with some friends for dinner. A local Target held an array of options. And after two decades spent away from the Pacific Northwest, getting recognized was the last thing on her mind. But before she could even enter the store, a voice from the other side of the closed automatic doors rang out.
“Jackie Stiles? The ponytail assassin?”
Nearly 24 years after Stiles was zipping past the W’s best and fading into picturesque middies inside of the Rose Garden—now known as the Moda Center—the W’s 2001 Rookie of the Year was immediately met with a living reminder of her impact across the City of Roses. Portland remembers.
This past January, Stiles was back in the PNW to help tell the story of a once-forgotten franchise and its revival. She thought that legacy, along with the one she had created for herself in the early 2000s, had been washed away like shells on the Oregon coast. Except the city that’s held an unyielding love and passion for the local women’s sports scene never forgot the impact of No. 10. If anything, they’ve been waiting for this return.
Surrounded by a sold-out 300-person event aboard the Portland Spirit, Stiles, Portland executives and fans looked out onto the calm Willamette River where a barge on the opposite bank proudly displayed an official look at the Portland Fire’s white threads for the 2026 season.
“This is amazing,” Stiles remembers saying at the time. “This just does not happen everywhere. It is so cool to see.”
In September 2024, the WNBA announced that Portland would be next in line to receive an expansion franchise. And by the following July, Stiles’ two-year career with the Fire was reignited when the organization announced it would be keeping the original name, branding and most importantly, its history.
“It’s been fun to see the reemergence of the Fire and the city’s excitement. They deserve it,” the Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer says. “I'm so happy for Portland, and I'm just so glad they kept the team name the same. Otherwise, if they changed it, it’s like we didn’t exist or didn’t matter. Now, it’s like, we can build on our few years of existence.”
After just three seasons from 2000-2002, the Fire folded in the summer of ’02 as the NBA and W adopted new ownership rules. Stiles, who had ignited a fan base and thousands of Jackie Stiles aspirants while battling injuries toward the end of her second season, was left sitting in Kansas without a path back to Oregon, let alone the W.
“I was just excited for Portland because they really didn't get closure, and neither did the team. All of a sudden, I'm home in the offseason, and I get a call that we are no longer going to exist. And that was it. I never came back,” Stiles says. “And so it was just nice that now they get a team, and they deserve it because of how supportive they are of women's athletics in general. They were just tremendous and so welcoming to myself and to our team. They made me feel like I'd grown up there. They adopted me like one of their own.”
Women’s sports in Portland have always been heralded. From the ABL’s Portland Power in the late ’90s to the Thorns fans that’ve been packing Providence Park since 2013. Seats are always filled to the brim for the opening rounds of March Madness. And when you can’t get into the game, there’s the Sports Bra, the LGBTQ+-owned bar on Broadway whose screens are dedicated solely to the athletic feats of women’s sports.
So when the Portland Fire started to make plans for its grand resurgence, there was only one call to make.
“Nobody deserves it more than Portland because they supported the WNBA before it was cool to do,” Stiles says. “Now it’s cool. It’s the in thing. They did that way before. And for these female athletes to get this opportunity in this time period when there’s this much excitement around the WNBA, I’m just so happy for them.”
Following their inaugural 2000 season, Portland selected Stiles out of Southwest Missouri State—now known as Missouri State—with the 4th overall pick. The 5-8 sharpshooter, who held the NCAA’s all-time scoring record, had just led her squad to a historic Final Four run. And before classes were even out in Springfield, Stiles was boarding a plane to Portland to report for training camp.
“Now I’m behind in school and I’ve got to finish school early. And I remember probably sleeping four hours a night, just exhausted. And then everybody back home, once I went to Portland, didn’t know if I still existed because it was so crazy when I once touched down in Portland,” Stiles says with a laugh. “They didn’t have anything to worry about because I was definitely taken care of. But I just remember hitting the ground running with different appearances and things as soon as I got into town.”
Her memory takes her first to the images of crowds that surrounded the arena, hotel and any appearance she or the team were involved with. The feeling was familiar, one shared from Portland to Springfield to Claflin.
“They would wait for my autograph, and I would see my jersey being worn. And I was just like, Wow, all the way here in Portland, Oregon, they’re wearing my jersey and they’re waiting for me to sign. Even on the road, they’d find out where our hotel was, which always amazed me, and there would be people there. It was just like a whole new world that exploded from our Final Four run into then being picked as the 4th pick by Portland,” Stiles says.
Across her playing career, Stiles says she’s lucky to have grown up playing in the communities she did. In high school, when Stiles and the Wildcats took the court, her hometown of Claflin, KS, shut down. Hours before tip, fans would flock to the entrance and camp out. Those who couldn’t fit in the stands piled into the cafeteria, where the school had hooked up a live feed from the gym.
The legend of her patented hop through the lane and persistent scoring outburst wrote legends that stretched from Central Kansas to each coast of the country. In her senior year, she only needed three quarters to drop a 71-piece. Then she proceeded to average 47.5 points, eight boards and 7 assists while becoming Kansas’ all-time scoring leader.
Then came Springfield, MO, where Stiles and the Lady Bears were selling out every home game on the schedule as a consistent top-15 in the nation. At Southwest Missouri State, she continued to defy history, scoring in amounts the game had never witnessed. The 2001 AP Player of the Year walked away a three-time All-American and four-time MVC Player of the Year while leading SMS to a historic back-to-back Final Fours.
Then she arrived in PDX. Everywhere Jackie Stiles went, an eruption of support followed. "They truly cared about you, not only as a basketball player, but a human being," she says. "And you felt that support and it drove you to be better to make that name proud."
The amount of attention from Oregonians and the media, nearly 2,000 miles from where she captured the allure of an entire region, was surprising at first. Throughout her entire career, Stiles had played the role of an underdog. From a town of 600 to leading a mid-major to national prominence as an undersized 2, proving herself was nothing new. But the Pacific Northwest had already been well-briefed on the abilities of one of the game’s purest scorers. It was just that Stiles didn’t feel like she had deserved all of the admiration quite yet. So she decided to earn it.
“The physicality of the game really stood out, and the speed as well. Because [when] you think about [it], these are the best players, not just in the US, but in the world. It’s just a whole other level again. At first, I was like, Am I cut out for this? Because I’m small. Everybody thought I was kind of small to be a 2 guard in the League. But I kind of just had one of those breakout games that then just made me believe, Oh yeah, I can play at this level,” Stiles says.
The game Jackie’s referencing arrived immediately, in her first exhibition game with the Fire. Facing off against one of her childhood heroes, Katie Smith, and the Minnesota Lynx, Stiles and the Fire huddled during a timeout with just a few seconds left in the game.
“Here I’m a rookie and the game is tied, and we have the ball. And there’s just a few seconds left. And in the time-out, I go, Coach, I want the ball. Give me the ball. We had a pretty big crowd for just an exhibition game. And I didn’t want to let the fans and the community down. It was the first time for them [to be] seeing us play that season. And I was able to hit the shot,” Stiles says.
The preseason game was just the precursor to Stiles' Rookie of the Year campaign in a class that featured Naismith Hall of Famers Lauren Jackson and Tamika Catchings. Across eight games, she dropped 20 or more, with her season-high of 32 arriving in late July against Lisa Leslie and the L.A. Sparks. Through all 32 games of the season, she averaged 14.9 points, 2.4 rebounds and nearly a steal a game while shooting 43.1 percent from three, stamping her historic rookie campaign with an All-Star nod.
Against the W’s taller, stronger and faster opponents, Stiles leaned on the thousands of hours she had logged playing 1-on-1 against guys in her hometown and college campus. That signature jump hop fadeaway in the lane was built out of necessity, not convenience or style. On the wing, Stiles was constantly assessing angles and opportunities that ended with more points on the board.
With blinding speed and a battle-tested IQ, she excelled at slicing between defenders and creating gaps where none existed. “Some of those things kind of came out at the professional level just because I had to,” Stiles says. And if you went under on the ball screen, just go ahead and grab it out the net. The range extended as far as the Cascades.
By the fifth week of the season, she’d earned Player of the Week honors. Midway through the season, teams shifted their game plan toward a persistent stream of traps and double teams, prompting Stiles to dive into the elusive side of her bag even further.
Her second season—and the Fire’s last—was riddled with a series of injuries that kept Stiles from reaching the peak of her powers in the W. But from the Moda Center to the grocery store, Portland will always remember when the fire was first lit. And with the team’s official return to the W in full swing, Stiles is ready to support the Fire just as proudly as the city of Portland still reps her red and black threads.
“I just hope they know how much putting on that jersey meant to us. How grateful we were for the opportunity to be able to wear Portland Fire across our chest. We’ve got a lot of pride just because of how the community supported us. And hopefully by the way we took the court and put our heart out there, hopefully we inspired other people, maybe not even athletes, that they can do more and be better in their careers just by watching us play. So hopefully we impacted the community in a positive way just by the passion in which we played and put that jersey on. We didn’t take it lightly.”
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