With boots on the ground and an approved multimillion dollar expansion, Utah Royals FC building for 2024 relaunch

URFC sporting director Kelly Cousins and president Michelle Hyncik met with local media to discuss a Utah arrival, and a forthcoming Royals-specific expansion to RSL's training facility in Herriman.

SANDY, Utah — For months, Michelle Hyncik sat in her office at America First Field and Real Salt Lake’s training grounds at the RSL Academy in Herriman as the first employee and team president of the relaunched Utah Royals FC, calling shots, making plans and setting up employees.

Now she’s got some company — a head coach in former high school teammate Amy Rodriguez and sporting director Kelly Cousins, chiefly — and the task of relaunching the Royals for the 2024 NWSL season is getting even more real.

As real as the forthcoming launch of a multi-million dollar expansion to the club’s training facility in Herriman, she teased Friday during a small roundtable with local media.

Full details of the facility expansion will be revealed at a later date, and details are still being finalized. But that includes all the details — right down to private rooms for breastfeeding and pumping, complete with a soothing carpet, for nursing mothers, as well as state-of-the-art footballing facilities.

“It’s a testament to the ownership’s trust in myself, in Amy and in Kelly. They really turned over the keys and gave us some optionality,” said Hyncik, complimenting the RSL ownership group led by David Blitzer and Ryan Smith. “The prior iteration of the Royals trained in Sandy and had more of their home base at the stadium, from a training perspective. But we have this incredible, largest freestanding indoor structure in the Western Hemisphere. We have the facilities that ownership and everyone in the team has invested in Herriman; it’s just mind blowing.

“Ownership is all about this. They believe that if the players don’t have the resources, support and facilities, that’s going to permeate everything in the organization. They want the best-of-the-best in terms of support, and so they’ve really turned over the keys to us. We solicited feedback from the union, we used Amy, who had been a captain her and trained here; she knows the community. And we’re going to have a big announcement and a groundbreaking in about a month for that huge, multi-million dollar investment in a new training facility space that is exclusive to the Royals.”

One tease for the new expansion, which will break ground in about a month?

“We already picked out the tiles,” Hyncik said. “There’s a lot of gold.”

Cousins compared the level of investment in the training center expansion for the Royals to the best in English football — specifically, Brighton and Hove Albion.

“They have invested millions into having their own women's performance base,” she said, adding that larger clubs like Chelsea, Manchester United and others have women’s club-specific areas located in the training and playing facilities in England, but this will go even further.

“I don’t think there’s one thing that’s been missed,” she added.

The new club feels more real for Hyncik, as well as Rodriguez, who has been hitting the recruiting trail and scouting draft-eligible players to potentially use the first pick of the NWSL college draft in January, as well as for Cousins and an unidentified scouting director.

“I get goosebumps thinking about it,” Hyncik said. “It’s always been sort of a dream, and now having Kelly sit here after flying out with her family from England, Amy is texting me about her house, and having those real moments — these are people’s lives that they are upending … They’re having that all tied to this mission of a women’s soccer team makes it a bigger purpose and mission that we’re all a part of. There’s nothing more fulfilling than to see it all come together.

“I know prior teams had 30 days or something to get going, but we’ve had the ability to be really strategic and to build the blocks, and to do it right. To have this foundation solidified and come together has been the most gratifying experience. The next step is our first player signing, I think.”

That will happen soon enough for the club. But the foundation is being laid.

NEWS AND NOTES

• After snapping a four-match winless skid across all competitions with a 2-0 win over Colorado that clinched the Rocky Mountain Cup for the 12th time in 15 years, RSL saw four players called up for international duties:

  • Kevon Lambert (Jamaica)

  • Braian Ojeda (Paraguay)

  • Rubio Rubin (Guatemala)

  • Jefferson Savarino (Venezuela)

• Pablo Mastroeni’s side resumes the final seven matches of the 2023 MLS regular season Saturday, Sept. 16 with a road tilt with the San Jose Earthquakes. Kickoff is scheduled for 8:30 p.m. MT on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV+.

• The club, in conjunction with Real Monarchs, also sent three players out on loan for the remainder of the season in rookie forward Ilijah Paul (Larne FC, Northern Ireland), homegrown defender Delentz Pierre (Colorado Springs Switchbacks, USL Championship) and defender Gennaro Nigro (ADO Den Haag, Netherlands).

• If you haven’t been paying attention to college soccer, the state of Utah has produced some of the most exciting teams in the country — led by No. 1-ranked BYU women’s soccer. The Cougars will travel to archrival Utah on Saturday night, with a 7 p.m. kickoff at Ute Field streaming on the Pac-12 Network.

• Meanwhile, Utah Valley women’s soccer — which lost to Utah 5-0 and BYU 6-1 last week — produced a monumental upset Thursday, handing No. 19 USC a 3-2 loss behind a hat trick from friend of the podcast Faith Webber.

  • "I'm really proud of the effort that every single player put in today," said Utah Valley head coach Chris Lemay, whose team travels to face Long Beach State on Sunday afternoon. "The grit and the concentration that our players had today is what it takes to win these types of games, but when we do it, I think we can play with anyone. We had a real heart-to-heart on Tuesday, and we talked a lot about what our character is and how we were going to respond to an ugly weekend. This was the only appropriate response for a team that's got this much talent and this much ambition to do good things this year. To say I'm proud is an understatement right now."