Emily Simpkins: Coming alive on the pitch

The sun is shining on Emily Simpkins. She is enjoying her second season on the technical staff of NWSL side Utah Royals – and enjoying the climate compared to the UK.

“It’s actually going great at the moment, if you just look at the table, but also behind closed doors as well,” she says. “This year we’ve put a lot more structure and processes into place now and I think you can see that reflecting on pitch. But if I come away from the football too, lifestyle is great over here, weather’s great over here!”

Utah Royals returned to the NWSL in 2024, when they finished 11th in the regular season. Last year, they finished 12th. This year, they have much bigger plans – and have made a sensational start to the campaign. After losing the first two matches of the season, they then put together an amazing unbeaten streak from the end of March that left them fourth in the table at the time Simpkins spoke to WSC in May 2026.

She joined Utah Royals for the 2025 campaign, after moving from England where she was assistant coach at Birmingham City following a successful playing career at the top level. Simpkins spent last season as IDP coach, and has just had her role tweaked to a more holistic one, meaning she’ll be spending more time on the pitch and involved in training sessions.

She reveals: “The previous season and a half, I’ve been leading all the IDPs, the individual development plans: really working out with the girls on a one-to-one basis, I was going over game clips, I was going over training clips of them. And then really focusing on the fine detail of what they can improve there.

“But now I’m coming away from that and taking on more of a main assistant role in a way - I will travel with the team.”

She adds: “I’ll be more hands-on now with sessions.

“Going into the next game, it will be a case of, for me, how do [the opposition] play and how can we best prepare our girls going into sessions to make sure we’re up against them as much as possible? So if something’s happening in a session and the full back’s not getting high like [the next opponents] do, that’s for me to own that and be like, ‘Right, we need you to play like that to give us the best chance.’

“Or I might be tasked with, ‘Can you check the midfield unit today? Are they playing like we want them to?’ So it’s more [of a] team aspect.”