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“We’re a blue-collar team,” Carlin-Voigt said. “And we’re a team that wants the ball and can possess the ball, but we also can win matches in different ways, without the ball, through set pieces, and at the end of the game, through defending.”

And it’s not just the men who have brought a buzz back to Clive Charles Stadium. The Pilots women, too, are undefeated at 5-0-4 and ranked No. 24. Last Friday, they played the Oregon Ducks to a 1-1 draw in front of a season-high 3,062 fans.

Portland is one of just two programs in the country, along with the Washington Huskies, to feature undefeated teams in both men’s and women’s soccer, and one of four with both men’s and women’s teams ranked in the top 25. The strong start to the season has rekindled optimism that the school that used to churn out national championship contenders is on its way back to the top of the sport.

Women’s coach Michelle French was a freshman in 1995, the first time Portland played for a national championship and a boom time for the Pilots program. With Clive Charles coaching both the men’s and women’s teams, each advanced to the College Cup, college soccer’s version of the Final Four. The women would make it back again in 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2001 before breaking through to win the program’s first national championship in 2002, Charles’ final season as coach. They won it all again in 2005, led by Megan Rapinoe, a future professional and international star.

But the success of both programs has since waned. The men haven’t advanced past the round of 16 in the NCAA Tournament since 1995 and not past the round of 32 since 2009. The women made the tournament field every year from 2000-2013, but have not returned to the College Cup since their 2005 championship. They haven’t played in the postseason since 2013.

Athletic director Scott Leykam hired Carlin-Voigt and French to restore both programs to their turn-of-the-century glory. Carlin-Voigt found success immediately, guiding the Pilots to a WCC championship and a trip to the NCAA Tournament during his first season as coach in 2016.

It was the Pilots’ first tournament berth since 2009, and they returned in 2018 and 2021.

Now, the team has bigger ambitions.

“We want to go into the league undefeated, take the league by storm, and then take the (national) title,” Cambridge said.

Carlin-Voigt’s confidence in his team is evident by his scheduling. Four of the Pilots’ first seven opponents — Indiana, UCLA, Denver and West Virginia — made last year’s NCAA Tournament, and Portland also won an exhibition match against second-ranked Washington. Monday’s victory over West Virginia marked the team’s second match in four days and third in a row against an opponent that has been ranked at some point this year, following a draw at No. 9 Denver last Friday and a home win over No. 15 UCLA on Sept. 10.

Carlin-Voigt put together the daunting non-conference slate to not only boost his team’s postseason resume, but also prepare it for the type of competition it could face in November. So far, the Pilots have been up to the challenge.

“We haven’t even played our best soccer yet,” Arteaga said. “But I think it’s still to come, and ... when our back’s against the wall, that work ethic and the mentality is just so strong that we’ve learned to win games and do whatever it takes.”

French, hired before the 2018 season, has been more methodical in her rebuild. Part of that has been necessitated by the nature of women’s sports, in which prospects tend to be recruited and commit to college programs years in advance. But French also decided she didn’t want to skip steps and field a team full of transfers or players with character concerns, opting instead to lay the foundation for the program by building a strong culture.

“It wasn’t going to be just about who they are as soccer players, because I think historically, when you look at teams that have been successful, male or female, there’s this air that they exhibit among each other,” French said. “And so the recruiting piece became a really important thing for us as we tried to figure out what we wanted the program to look like moving forward.”

The progress of the women’s side might actually be ahead of schedule. French said she liked her team coming into the season, but didn’t anticipate that it would be undefeated after nine matches.

The key to the breakthrough has been defense. Portland has allowed just 0.44 goals per game, second-fewest in the WCC. Junior striker Nedya Sawan said the Pilots’ defensive dominance is a byproduct of French’s consistent, methodical approach.

“We’ve been doing the same rotations for years now, ever since I’ve been here,” Sawan said. “So I think just that repetition and working on it and working on it and fine-tuning it until it’s just this defensive line that’s hard to break, I think, is the key to our success defensively.”

Both the men’s and women’s teams have concrete goals this season, be it winning the WCC or returning to the NCAA Tournament. They’re chasing something a bit more abstract, too: respect.

Portland is proud of its soccer tradition. The list of conference titles, College Cup appearances and national championships printed behind the North goal on The Bluff provide a permanent reminder of the school’s one-time dominance.

French has told her players about Charles and the teams she played on. Prior to a matchup against UCLA, Carlin-Voigt gave his team a history lesson about Portland’s win over the Bruins in the 1988 NCAA Tournament, which not only precipitated a run to the College Cup in the program’s first tournament appearance, but also spurred timber magnate Henry Merlo to donate the money to build the team’s state-of-the-art stadium.

But nowadays, the school sometimes can feel like just another mid-major program trying to climb uphill to compete with better-funded, Power Five teams. Carlin-Voigt said it wasn’t lost on his locker room that Portland didn’t appear in any preseason top 25 polls. French said it can be difficult to convince recruits that they can realistically compete for national titles at a WCC school, despite the fact that her own program has won two.

“It’s important for the people that we recruit and it’s important for players that have been here to know that important part of our history and that we embrace it,” French said. “And our goal is to get back to that place.”

Both teams know that the only way to rectify that, to position Portland back among college soccer’s elite, is by winning. Their undefeated starts have this season looking like a step in the right direction.

“The collective goal is to put UP back on the map as a women’s soccer power program,” Sawan said.

Added Cambridge: “We’re always looked down on, being a small school. So I think that we’re here to make a name for ourselves and show the NCAA that we can win this thing.”

-- Mitchell Forde, for The Oregonian/OregonLive