After departing Reading F.C. in England’s FA Women’s Super League earlier this year, Kelly Chambers is heading to another set of Royals — this time in the National Women’s Soccer League.
On Tuesday morning, the Utah Royals announced that Chambers would be the club’s new sporting director. This is the expansion side’s first major staffing announcement since former U.S. women’s team and Utah Royals player Amy Rodriguez was announced as head coach in April.
Chambers previously spent more than 20 years with Reading, first as a player and then, after suffering an ACL injury in 2012, as the Director of Women’s and Girl’s football. Reading was in the third tier of English football at the time of Chambers’ transition to management and under her guidance they made it up to the second tier by 2013. By 2015, they had won the WSL 2 division and earned a promotion to the top flight. Reading remained in the first division for eight straight years and had its best performance in the 2017/2018 season when it finished fourth in the standings behind Arsenal, Chelsea, and Manchester City.
After being relegated in this most recent season, Reading announced that they would be reverting their women’s team to part-time which prompted Chambers to make the “extremely difficult decision to step away from the club” where she’d spent her entire professional career.
In Chambers, the Royals have an incredibly experienced and resourceful director with a proven history of taking underdogs to unexpected heights. Although adjusting to the NWSL will likely present its challenges, being paired with Rodriguez — one of the most experienced and successful U.S. players of all time — should help ease the transition. With Utah preparing to enter the league in 2024 and with the expansion and college drafts only a few months away, Chambers will need to hit the ground running to get the team ready for their inaugural season. Still, with her track record of turning a third-division team into a first-division mainstay in spite of limited resources and funding, there’s a lot here for Utah fans to be excited about.
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