Fleur Benatar has helped guide the UNT soccer team, the most successful athletic program in North Texas history that has never had a losing season, through multiple stages of its 25-year history to where it is now as one of the most consistently dominate mid-major programs in the nation and a Conference USA champion six years in a row and running.
Benatar played for head coach John Hedlund during the program's infancy in the mid to late 1990s. She then later was an assistant coach for the Mean Green in 2001 when the program captured its first of now 16 conference titles as they won the Sun Belt Conference regular season crown.
After a 11-year stint as Texas Woman's University's first women's soccer head coach where she led 47 women to all-conference honors and six to all-region honors, Benatar returned to UNT in 2015 to help lead the Mean Green to what was the start of its current run of six straight C-USA championships.
In 2015, UNT won a program-best 19 games and shutout a program-record 15 opponents. They won the C-USA regular season and tournament championship to earn an automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament. Since the start of the 2015 season, UNT has won 78 matches while losing just 21. They've reached the NCAA Tournament four of the last five years and won either league regular season and/or tournament championship each year.
Benatar has helped coach 2019 graduate Dominique James to an all-American honor. James, the two-time C-USA Defensive Player of the Year and 2018 C-USA Player of the Year, is the program's first-ever all-American.
Each year since 2015, UNT has had the most all-conference honors in C-USA, averaging eight per year. In 2019, goalie Kelsey Brann was named the league's goalie of the year.
Benatar has coaching experience throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area at the club level, with the Olympic Development Program (ODP) and with US Soccer.
Benatar has more than 20 years of experience coaching club soccer, working with Liberty FC, Sting Soccer Club, Solar Soccer Club and Liverpool FC America. Since 2016, she was a coach for Region III of the Olympic Development Program, where she evaluated, coached and mentored top soccer players in the region.
Benatar is also involved with soccer at the national level. Since 2013, she has been a national team training coach at the US Soccer’s Dallas Training Center.
She holds a U.S.S.F. National “A” coaching license and is a state-level course instructor.
A graduate of Richardson High School, Benatar played college soccer for two seasons at Arkansas before transferring to North Texas in 1996. She received her undergraduate degree in kinesiology from North Texas in 1999 and her master’s degree in kinesiology in May 2002.
Benatar and her husband, Will, have a daughter, Gabrielle and two sons, Fletcher and Phillip.