Halfway through Utah Royals FC’s 2025 season, sporting director Kelly Cousins thought to herself, “How are we here again?”
The Royals had just one win in 13 games.
Around this point last year, the team was 2-11-2 but found momentum under new head coach Jimmy Coenraets and won five more games to close out its inaugural season.
The Royals had hoped to carry that momentum into the 2025 season, but that wasn’t the case.
But “that really allowed us to reflect,” Cousins told reporters Friday during exit interviews.
Cousins, whose contract was officially extended Friday, then met with Coenraets and Jason Kreis, the Real Salt Lake legend who was named president of soccer operations last week.
In that meeting, Cousins and Kreis told Coenraets that “whatever we’re doing, it’s just not working.” They then created a document called the Royals Way.
“It’s really developing the Royals way of doing things, the Royal way of playing, of showing up, of communicating,” Coenraets said.
In August, the Royals faced another setback when they lost Ally Sentnor, the No. 1 overall pick from 2024. Sentnor had requested a trade and was sent to the Kansas City Current.
But despite falling apart after losing its young star, the team pulled together, and players reflected on what they could do individually to help the team succeed, Coenraets said.
“I think it was kind of a moment in the season where everyone came together more and when people thought we would fall apart, and people really thought, like, ‘OK, Ally left. Now what’s going to happen with the Royals?’” Coenraets said.
The coach said that “togetherness” is the one word to describe the team’s second half of the season.
“It was really a group of players that found themselves and each other,” he said. “They found a common enemy, and that was whoever we were playing against and whoever was saying that we would fall apart.”
Utah Royals FC finished its second season back in the NWSL with a 6-13-7 record and in 12th place in the 14-team league.
How the Utah Royals will improve in 2026
The 2025 season was a challenging one for many players personally and collectively as a team.
“I think we learned a lot about ourselves. There were some dark times, and I think we kind of figured out how to pull ourselves out of it,” defender Lauren Flynn said.
The players themselves are aware of the team’s trend of starting slow. Captain Paige Monaghan said that trend has to end moving forward if the team wants to be elite.
“We just have to start with quality from the beginning, you know what I mean?” she said. “I think that comes from the players, and I also think that comes from the staff,” Monaghan said.
Last season as an expansion team, the Royals “were just doing our best,” said Kate Del Fava, the team’s consecutive starts leader.
“I think this year, we just kind of tried to jump the gun a bit on some of the really simple stuff, like in preseason, and so I think we’ve just decided that preseason is going to be just a learning experience for all of us, even the players that have been here for the last two years. Like, we’re starting over, and we’re starting at ground one and making sure it’s clear from first day what the standards and expectations are,” she said.
Coenraets expressed a similar sentiment when evaluating this season’s slow start, saying that instead of starting the preseason at zero, the team got ahead of itself and believed it was already at 30%.
But Coenraets said they’ve learned from that mistake. He later likened the team to a young child.
“We’re two years old now, which at the age of two, I think every child makes loads of mistakes they learn from. I’m not in a situation where I can vouch for it, but I do know someone that can,” he said, referencing Cousins sitting next to him.
“But I truly believe that’s what we’re doing right now, and again, it’s learning from those mistakes, but also just growing throughout the process. I’m growing with those mistakes to move forward.”
The Royals want a better end to the season in 2026 than in 2025. Multiple players expressed their hopes of earning a spot in the playoffs next year.
The Royals front office also has high expectations for the franchise with its sights set on winning an NWSL championship in the future, Cousins said.
“The goal is to win a championship,” she said. “There’s no denying that. There’s no hiding from that, but there’s a process to that, and I think what we want to do is, yes, we want to get there, but we want to get there and stay there.
“We want to be competing for that consistently.”
Before it can get there, it comes down to consistency, according to the sporting director.
”To be able to do that, we have to build the foundations underneath that, and we don’t want to spiral — as we know this league can — in terms of, you can finish first one season, and you can be in the bottom half of the table in the second season," Cousins said.
“So we don’t want to be that, so it’s just about finding that consistency, keeping that consistency and making sure then we keep growing and building on that.”
In 2026, the Royals will also look to add more NWSL experienced players to the roster. The team values its international players but recognizes the adjustment period they experience when joining the NWSL.
The Royals will lean heavily on their new head of recruitment, Harvey Bussell, whose hiring was announced Friday, according to Cousins.
“This league is a completely different animal to any other league in the world. It truly is,” Cousins said. “We’ve just lacked experience of that, and I think looking forward, we need to bring in that experience.”
Utah Royals FC finished its second season back in the NWSL with a 6-13-7 record and in 12th place in the 14-team league.