When Jimmy Coenraets was named interim manager of the Utah Royals, they were the worst team in the National Women’s Soccer League.
Collectively, the expansion club was a mess. But if Coenraets was going to pick up the pieces, he figured he had to do it one by one.
So he met with each player on the roster.
“This is what I expect from you,” he said.
“What do you need from me?” he asked.
For goalkeeper Mandy Haught it was a chance to be part of Team USA. Defender Ana Tejada wanted to position herself to become a regular call-up for Spain’s La Rioja.
When rookie forward Brecken Mozingo started to run through her goals, Coenraets stopped the former BYU Cougar star. She was being too humble — and her coach was looking for a spark.
“Once you find that fire in someone’s eyes,” Coenraets said, “that’s what keeps them going.”
It has kept the Royals going through a challenging inaugural season.
And after many losses and uncertainty to start the campaign, the Royals will play their final game of the season on Friday knowing that they have the building blocks needed for the future and that Coenraets will be the man leading the way.
“It offers the opportunity for us to look forward,” said Coenraets, whose interim tag was removed last week when he signed a contract through the 2027 season.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Royals goalkeeper Mandy Haught (1) blocks a kick during the game against the Kansas City Current at America First Field in Sandy on Saturday, May 25, 2024.
It’s an opportunity Coenraets earned by salvaging the present.
In June, the Royals fired coach Amy Rodriguez midway through the expansion team’s first season after winning just twice in 15 games.
“It was a big step. I truly believe it was something that needed to be done for the group, for the players,” said Royals Sporting Director Kelly Cousins. “Obviously the results weren’t going the way we needed them to. But I truly believed we had a talented group and we needed someone that could bring that out of them.”
The Royals turned to Coenraets, a 29-year-old from Belgium who had joined the club as an assistant a few weeks earlier. He had resuscitated a struggling team before, taking over a last-place Belgian club OH Leuven in 2020 and turning them into a title contender.
So he got to work immediately.
“You don’t want any player to lose a season,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if we’re six months into the season. … Let’s not spend four or five months being who we don’t want to be. Let’s start building a few blocks and see where we end up.”
Those were blocks Coenraets started stacking individually.
“What we did in the first few days was also discover the why for every individual player,” Coenraets said. “That was the biggest part of what we did in the first few days: rediscovering what brings the person to the facility.”
Cousins barely recalls her new coach leaving his office during his first days on the job as he held those one-on-one meetings with each player.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Royals forward Brecken Mozingo (15) and Kansas City Current midfielder Lo'eau LaBonta (10) fight for the ball during the game at America First Field in Sandy on Saturday, May 25, 2024.
“That was the key piece to me — finding someone who was really player-centered,” Cousins said. “Somebody that was really going to invest in these players. It wasn’t just about him. It wasn’t just about the club.”
A week after Coenraet took over, the Royals earned a 0-0 tie against Portland in his first game as interim manager. That might not seem like much to outsiders, but for a club that had been blasted 6-0 in Rodriguez’s final match, the tie sparked belief.
The team has now gone 5-3-2 under Coenraets. In six fewer matches, the Royals have tripled the points they earned during Rodriguez’s tenure. They’ve also scored 23 goals — “a stark difference from the 7 goals scored to open the season,” the club noted in a recent news release.
Cousins believed the team she’d helped assemble hadn’t performed to its full potential under Rodriguez. The Royals just needed someone to extract that.
“Credit to Jimmy, he’s been able to bring that out of the players,” Cousins said. “Every week it just became more and more undeniable that he was going to be the head coach.”
On Friday, the Royals will host Gotham FC in their final match of the season. The club was eliminated from playoff contention some time ago, but Coenraets and his squad won’t be focused on that.
“In the huddle, I said there are going to be a lot of people who say that we have to play for but they didn’t see our team those six weeks that we were in the bottom,” Royals defender Madison Pogarch said after the team’s penultimate game. “They didn’t see our team midway through the season when Jimmy came in and we were at the office for six or seven hours, running and working and basically in a second preseason.
“We’ve been playing for something bigger. We’ve been playing for something that’s going to be best for our future.”
For Coenraets, that means one step, one game, one player at a time.
