Jimmy Coenraets is not your usual coach.
We are speaking shortly after he finished a 33-mile bike ride through the canyons by the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the kind of thing the 31-year-old Belgian does on the days when he is not trying to turn the NWSL’s Utah Royals FC into one of the league’s toughest teams.
“I think it’s still a Belgian piece of me,” Coenraets said. “On my days off, I try to get out and get into the canyons. Other times, I just cycle to work, to stay fit and healthy. Utah is probably one of the places where you can really go on an adventure with your bike.”
Coenraets loves a good workout: biking, skiing, water sports. But none of that factored into his decision to move to Utah. In fact, he knew little to nothing about the state when the Royals first came calling. His mother could not even pin Utah on the map.
“She’s like, ‘Oh, so you’re moving to the UK?’” he recalled, laughing. “That’s how much people in Belgium knew about Utah before I came to Utah.”
Coenraets arrived with one idea of what his life and career might look like and has spent much of the past two years learning to adapt to something else.
When he came to the Royals in June 2024 as an assistant coach, he joined a club still trying to find its footing after returning to the NWSL, a roster assembled under expansion constraints, and a market that does not possess the recruiting pull of Los Angeles or New York.
He also arrived with very specific ideas about how to play soccer. Some of them had to go.
“If you look at the way we play as a team right now, that’s not 100 percent how I’m used to playing,” Coenraets said. “But it does suit what we have, where we are as a franchise, and it suits within the plan of where we want to go.”
For someone whose academic background is rooted in strategy, that adjustment may have been the most important one.
Coenraets, a center back growing up, could not complete his dreams of becoming a pro because of a heart condition. He then focused on academics, earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing, a master’s in strategy and a postgraduate qualification in international football business. His love for the sport led him to an internship at We Play Strong, one of UEFA’s flagship women’s soccer initiatives, during his graduate studies. Coenraets seemed to be heading toward the business side of soccer.
Then coaching found him.
His boss’s club, OH Leuven, needed someone to take over its women’s second team. Coenraets, who was passionate about coaching, agreed to do it. In fact, he jumped at the opportunity. Growing up, his sister played professionally in Belgium. Their conversations were often about how she was fed up with the poor conditions around the women’s game, the lack of support and the sense that there was no real professional structure waiting for players.
“I always get a bit emotional when I’m talking about it,” he said. “I looked her in the eyes and told her: ‘You know what? I’ll just do it myself.’ Let’s build something that’s sustainable. Let’s build something that’s a blueprint for women’s football in Belgium.’” Within two years, the club he started coaching became the first in Belgium to offer every player a semi-professional contract and move training into daytime hours.
That distinction may sound modest now. It was not at the time.
Across parts of Europe, women’s teams were still training in the evenings, after men’s teams had finished and wherever field space became available. Coenraets became interested not just in coaching players but in building systems around them.
He began consulting alongside his coaching work, eventually traveling to Norway to teach a master class for women’s soccer directors. Someone connected to the Royals was there.
After the first day, she approached him.
“You have to come and work for me,” Coenraets remembers her saying. “We’ll find something.”
Several months later, Utah did. His arrival almost didn’t happen.
Coenraets has undergone six heart surgeries, including three open-heart procedures. His most recent major operation came in November 2023. When he woke up, his longtime surgeon told him something that would alter his perspective on almost everything that came next.
“They actually told me that they lost me during the surgery,” Coenraets said. He was 28.
The surgeon, who had known him for 27 years, told him to go live. “He said, ‘You have to go out and do it’,” Coenraets recalled. “’You have to do something amazing because this could have been your end’.”
Three days later, Coenraets signed with the Royals. But life had other plans. A serious internal bleed halted his move overseas. Doctors would not clear him to travel for three months. He had to cancel the agreement and eventually began moving toward a job in Germany.
Then Utah’s then-sporting director, Kelly Cousins, called. Utah was still interested, only now the opportunity was as an assistant coach.
In some ways, the reduced role appealed to him. He had spent much of his twenties being pushed into bigger coaching jobs faster than he had expected. At a previous club, he took over the second team only for the first-team coach to be fired a month later. He became interim coach and then permanent head coach. By the time he reached Utah, he was ready to spend some time in the background. That lasted only so long.
Amy Rodriguez was dismissed in June 2024, and Coenraets was elevated to interim head coach. The circumstances shaped how some supporters viewed him from the beginning.
“I think everyone saw me as the guy that pushed Amy Rodriguez out of the building,” he said. “And I think a lot of them still think I’m that kind of person.”
He was walking into a difficult job.
Utah’s roster was not built specifically for the style he preferred to coach, and unlike in much of European soccer, the NWSL does not allow a struggling club simply to turn over half its roster in one transfer window. The salary cap changes the calculus. Coenraets and the analyst who came with him studied what Utah had and what it could realistically become. If they wanted to press high, several players did not necessarily fit that model. If they wanted to build aggressively from the back, a different group might struggle.
The answer was not to replace everyone. It was to stop trying to make the players fit the idea.
“I think that was the biggest piece for me as a coach,” Coenraets said. “Pushing ego and what you know aside, and really trying to reboot, restart.”
He said he believes European coaches entering the NWSL can underestimate how much adaptation the league requires. The rules are different. The roster mechanisms are different. Travel is different. Recruitment is different.
“The first week that Jimmy was here, we went to Orlando and we lost 6-0, his first game on the bench,” defender Kate Del Fava recalled. “So we were kind of like, ‘Jimmy, I don’t think you’re very good for us. I think you need to go back to Belgium right now.’” But he stayed. That willingness to adapt has become part of Utah’s identity. Long gone are the disappointing results of that first season (7-4-15) and the restructuring of 2025 (6-7-13), and now comes a record-breaking 2026 campaign. The team went on a 10-match unbeaten streak, and with an impressive 32 goals already under their belt, they have an impressive record (10-3-6) midway through the season.
Coenraets hears from other NWSL coaches that his team is “so annoying to play against.”
“You can defend, you can suffer, you can score, you can attack,” he said. “We can be dominant.”
The phrase his staff has embraced is even simpler: We find a way.
Against Denver recently, Utah spent roughly 80 minutes trying one approach without scoring. During a stoppage late in the game, the staff changed the plan, identifying areas where they wanted deliveries and asking their taller players to attack them. Roughly 10 minutes later, Utah scored in almost exactly the manner they had discussed. For Coenraets, that sequence captured what the Royals have become: a team capable of solving problems.
That mentality extends beyond tactics. Coenraets said one of his biggest evolutions as a coach has been understanding that managing people matters as much as managing a system. He works with a sports and performance psychologist and has invested heavily in understanding his own behavior. He has also learned that players do not always need another technical correction. Sometimes they need someone to ask how they are doing.
“He’s somebody who’s very direct, and I think as a player, that’s what you want in a coach. When we sit down and have conversations, there’s never any confusion about what he expects from me, what I need to improve on, or what he thinks I’m doing well,” Del Fava said.
“That level of communication has been so vital for me personally as a player,” she added. “That’s an area of his coaching style that he’s really worked to improve, and we’ve been able to see that every day. At the end of the day, we’re all human, and we all want that emotional connection.”
That is not necessarily the version of himself Coenraets envisioned when he began coaching.
He still has a relentless desire to improve. He still obsesses over details. But he has become increasingly convinced that soccer is, at its core, a people business. He even invoked “Ted Lasso” while describing it. Coenraets does not pretend to have modeled himself after the fictional coach, but parts of the show have stuck with him, particularly the idea of being a goldfish: reset quickly, let the last moment go and move forward.
That philosophy became more serious for him after Angel City defender Savy King collapsed during a match against Utah in May 2025. For Coenraets, the scene was impossible to separate from his own history. Years earlier, he watched one of his closest friends collapse during a game because of heart rhythm problems. Several games later, Coenraets himself went down on the field. His cardiologist eventually told him his heart could not sustain the demands of the playing career he was chasing. Then came the surgeries.
Watching King receive emergency medical treatment brought all of that back.
“Seeing Savy going down and everything that happened, just again put perspective to what we do on a daily basis. We say football is life. But I think it shouldn’t. Life is football. I think that’s the most important part that I took away from that game after that day, and I also think it changed my perspective on how I treat players,” he said.
While he still wants a demanding environment in Utah, he just no longer believes demanding has to mean relentless. Players need standards, he said, but they also need an environment that is sustainable and human.
The head coach is the public face of almost everything that happens around a team, including things the public cannot see. Coenraets received messages telling him to go back to Belgium. Some supporters blamed him for Rodriguez’s departure. Family members of former players criticized him online. For the first eight or nine games, he said, some fans booed when his name was announced inside the stadium. In 2025, the pressure began taking a toll. Coenraets gained around 30 pounds. His mental health deteriorated.
“I wasn’t seeing the end of it,” he said. “I couldn’t see it. Like, why am I doing what I’m doing?”
He said he believes soccer still does a poor job discussing coaches’ mental health. The public expectation is that they should simply develop thicker skin.
But with Utah’s spectacular season, that attitude has changed. Recently, while he was running, somebody tapped Coenraets on the shoulder and told him he was doing an amazing job. He laughed while recounting it. “In the next four weeks,” he said, “they could be telling me I’m s—.”
That may be the clearest explanation of why Coenraets still runs before every match.
It is his closest thing to a superstition. On game days, he runs until he is tired enough to drain some of the nervous energy before kickoff. Then he takes his spot on the sideline, walking up and down.
For all of the challenges of coaching in Utah, Coenraets said he believes the NWSL’s structure also gives clubs such as the Royals an unusual opportunity. He is a defender of the salary cap. In Europe, ambitious ownership can always direct more money toward buying better players. In the NWSL, roster spending is constrained, forcing clubs to look elsewhere for competitive advantages.
“There is no salary cap on staff,” Coenraets said. “There is no salary cap on your investments in facilities. That pushes spending toward training grounds, staffing, performance departments and infrastructure.”
But recruiting elite players to Utah remains a challenge. Coenraets said the Royals have pursued players who ultimately chose different markets.
But Coenraets understands Utah needs more than money to become a destination.
It needs proof. If the Royals reach the playoffs, suddenly they have something tangible to sell prospective players. “You have something to put on the table next to just money,” Coenraets said.
Ask him now for the one-, three- and five-year plan he once might have built for a consulting client, however, and the answer has changed.
The one-year goal is straightforward: reach the playoffs and make history. The three-year goal is to establish a recognizable Utah identity, one built on aggression without the ball while gradually adding more quality and creativity in possession.
The five-year plan is less defined.
“If you start focusing too much on the very long term,” he said, “you get lost in what you do right now.” That is a curious conclusion for someone trained to build strategic road maps.
It may also explain why Utah suits him.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Utah Royals FC, NWSL, Women's Soccer
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