Caleb Porter’s mind starts to race these days when his alarm goes off at 6 a.m. The new head coach of the Columbus Crew has staff members to hire. Roster moves to discuss. Film to watch. Preseason plans to go over. People to meet.

He says it’s like he’s drinking from a fire hose. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

“It’s been a whirlwind, but I feel alive again,” Porter said. “Truly alive.”

That feeling is something that Porter missed during his year away from the game.

In November 2017, Porter made the shocking decision to step down as the head coach of the Portland Timbers following five successful seasons with the club. The unexpected move came after the Timbers finished first in the Western Conference but were eliminated early in the playoffs due in part to an onslaught of injuries.

Initial reports indicated that there may have been a power struggle between Porter, Timbers owner Merritt Paulson and general manager Gavin Wilkinson prior to Porter’s departure. But Porter and the Timbers have consistently denied those rumors. In fact, Porter said he congratulated Paulson and Wilkinson after almost every one of Portland’s wins last season.

After five years in Portland, Porter said he simply felt he had no more to give to the club. He took over a Timbers team in 2013 that was coming off a demoralizing 2012 season and led the club to a first-place finish in the West in his first season at the helm. Porter then brought the Timbers their first MLS Cup title two years later – coincidentally leading Portland to victory over the Crew at Mapfre Stadium. He finished his Timbers career with a 68-50-52 record.

“I started to think about what’s the next goal and what’s motivating me and how am I continuing to grow and what gets me out of bed every day,” said Porter about what led him to leave the Timbers. “There were times when I didn’t have the answer to those things. I needed to make a change to continue to grow. I loved my time at that club, but I felt like it was the perfect moment for me to leave after we won the West and the club was stable.”

Over a year after stepping down as the Timbers head coach, Porter continues to believe that he made the right decision.

But that didn’t make the time away from the pitch any easier for someone as competitive and driven as Porter.

In February 2018, Porter and his family left their Lake Oswego home and moved to South Carolina. There, Porter took on the role of regular dad and husband. He spent weekends at his children’s youth soccer games. He took on projects around the house. He found time to travel with his wife, Andrea.

He tried to appreciate the time off, but he also knew something was missing.

It was his first break from coaching in 17 years. Prior to joining the Timbers, Porter was the head coach at the University of Akron from 2006-2012. He led the Zips to a national championship in 2010. Before that, he was an assistant at Indiana University.

“In reflection this year, the biggest thing I realized is how much I love coaching and love being around the team, the players, the staff, being in games, being on the training pitch,” Porter said. “Sometimes you take those things for granted, but I really missed them. Not having that purpose was difficult because when you aren’t able to do what you love best, what you do best, you feel a little bit like a lost soul.”

Porter began to feel especially restless when the 2018 MLS season started last March. For the first five weeks of the season, Porter watched every Timbers game. Portland started the season away from home due to construction at Providence Park, and Porter didn’t find it that difficult to follow his former team while they were on the road.

But he couldn’t bring himself to watch the club’s home opener in April. It was too much for Porter to see the packed house at Providence Park, to hear the Timbers Army fill the stadium with their chants and to watch his successor Giovanni Savarese pace the sideline.

“The best analogy I can come up with, and I’ve not experienced this, but I compare it to what it would probably be like to have a stepdad parenting your kids on the weekend,” Porter said. “That’s just kind of the feeling initially and then you just get over it. It’s hard at first.”

Seeing Portland play at Providence Park remained difficult for Porter throughout 2018, but, by May, he was watching every MLS game, including Timbers matches, as he began to plot his comeback. He didn’t know if an opportunity to return to coaching would come in July or August or December, but he wanted to be ready when his chance came.

In early December, the Timbers earned an unlikely berth to the 2018 MLS Cup. At the same time, Akron made a run to the NCAA national championship game. During a packed weekend, Porter jetted from Columbus to Los Angeles to interview for head coaching positions with both the Crew and Galaxy. In between the interviews, he watched both of his former teams compete for titles. He knew at that point that he would be back in MLS in 2019. That made it easier to tune in to the games.

“The emotions were crazy, for sure,” Porter said. “But it made me really proud to see my two former clubs still doing well and still competing for the two trophies that I won when I was there.”

A month after the 2018 MLS Cup game, the Columbus Crew announced that Porter would take over the head coaching spot vacated by new U.S. National Team coach Gregg Berhalter.

Following the success of the “Save the Crew” effort in 2018, Columbus is heading into a new era under a new ownership group with the Haslam and Edwards families. Porter, who grew up in Michigan and closely followed the Crew as a player and young coach, said something clicked when he interviewed for the Crew job. In Columbus, he felt that he would have the opportunity to build on Berhalter’s success and help to reenergize and elevate the Crew as the historic organization entered a new era.

“In a lot of ways, I’m doing with Columbus what Gio is doing in Portland,” Porter said. “Your predecessors, if they’ve poured their guts into something, like Gregg has, I think it’s important to pay respect to that because nobody realizes everything that goes into what he has done in Columbus and what I did at Portland for five years.”

The Timbers will travel to play Porter’s Crew on April 20. Porter said he is sure there will be some heightened emotions around the game, but, for him, it will be much more difficult to return to Portland when the Crew travel to play the Timbers in 2020. Coaching from the visiting bench at Providence Park will be uncomfortable.

Still, Porter remains proud of the foundation that he built in Portland, and at Akron before that. Those memories will stick with him even as he moves on to the next chapter in his coaching career.

“I’m proud of my time there,” Porter said. “Put it this way, the MLS Cup trophy will collect dust, but no one is taking that away and that will always be remembered. Wins, losses, players, coaches – they come and go. But the memories and the hardware, they collect dust, but you can’t take them away. Those are things that last forever.”

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com

503-853-3761 | @jamiebgoldberg