As Peter Reynders was growing up surrounded by the lung-clogging coal fields of Belgium, his underground-mining father told him that his son would never work in those same tunnels.
And the son never did.
Instead, for the past four decades Reynders has been mining for soccer diamonds in the rough. And he’s repeatedly struck the motherlode, in Canada and Belgium.
As the CPL and Canadian soccer endeavour to maximize the national and regional interest in The Beautiful Game triggered by the recent FIFA Men’s World Cup, the Forge assistant coach personifies how a well-conceived and coordinated approach can alter soccer fortunes.
Reynders is in his second stint as Bobby Smyrniotis’s lead assistant at Forge. He was here in 2019 and ’20 for the club’s first two years and championships as Forge developed young players, most memorably Tristan Borges, for more highly regarded leagues. By then, he’d already known and mentored Smyrniotis and his brother Costa for a half-dozen years after serving as a featured guest instructor at their annual Sigma FC Academy camps. When the pandemic struck, he left Forge to be with his family in Belgium, but he came back this year.
Before and after his first Forge tenure, he was with Jong Genk, the youth academy considered among the best in the world and central to the creation of Belgium’s Golden Generation, which has captured so much attention on the world stage.
Among others at Genk, Reynders coached superstar Kevin De Bruyne, keeper Thibaut Courtois, centre back Arthur Teate, and Timothy Castagne, who played prominent roles in Belgium’s deep run, and Yannick Carrasco, the former Atlético Madrid standout who was part of Belgium’s 2018 Cup squad.
There were other Jong Genk players with Belgium at this World Cup, and Reynders worked closely with them all.
“In 2005 we changed the way of working in our academy,” said Reynders, who was an unpaid Genk youth coach at the time. “The biggest question was ‘Why can’t we provide or develop a Lionel Messi? What do we have to change in our academy to provide top talents?’”
The biggest alteration was that there were no longer “rankings on the wall”, league standings which prioritized winning titles at a young age over developing individual players. It was a model later adopted by Norway to become an outsized world power compared to its soccer population and which the Smyrniotis’s had started to use at Sigma, rarely winning titles but sending hundreds of players to NCAA scholarships and professional leagues.
Six years after the implementation of the winning-is-secondary-to-development approach at the younger tiers, Genk had developed the heart of Belgium’s Golden Generation and Reynders worked closely with all of them in their youngest years.
When the academy went to full-time paid youth coaches in 2014, it only applied to the older age groups, so Reynders moved up to the U-15s and U-16s, and finally “fulfilled my dream to work full-time in soccer.”
Those clubs dominated their age-class competitions, and Reynders recalls that de Bruyne “was fantastic as a youth, but he was struggling because he was always thinking 1-2-3 steps ahead but other guys but the other guys with him couldn’t do that. The best I had at age 13-14 was Carrasco.”
“It’s not about only identification of players; it’s the way you develop them. Back then you used isolated exercises in training for different parts of the game. But we started to do all of them together; the technical things, the tactical, the physical things, but also the mindset. So, we bring them all together in one (training) exercise so that the players will always be challenged to play faster, to think faster.”
“It’s not just the technical stuff because there are a lot of players around the world who are technical…without pressure. If you’re doing it without pressure, the next step is to do it with pressure. And you have to do it in small spaces because I’m convinced that if you can do things in small spaces, you open up space and it will be easier.”
“That’s the way we think in Genk and the way we think here at Forge.”
One international soccer coaching analysis firm has Reynders rated as 9 out of a possible 10 at recognizing talent, and Smyrniotis says that’s been an important part of Reynders’ two terms here.
“He sees a lot of the individual technical detail of the players,” Smyrniotis says. “He sees beyond the tactical side, and it’s always good to have a different set of tactical eyes. At the end of each training session, he’s always got a small group of guys he’s working with… he’s got a great ability to connect with players on the little details of the game.”
“He brings a lot of different things to the club. We’d already known each other well—spending a lot of time talking about the game—for six or seven years when the CPL was starting. He had a lot of experience with youth and world-class players, and I thought it was important to have somebody with a lot of different outside exposure here. We were building a league and wanting to develop players, and there’s no better person for that. He’s worked with some of the top players this game has seen on a global stage. So, it was a natural fit.”
Reynders says Sigma’s early structure was patterned on the Netherlands’ Ajax, one of the most highly-regarded programs in the world, but adds it had become “more of a Genk Academy way” when he arrived, and he was used to working in that fashion: where it’s not only about winning but the way you win, the way you play, things like playing on the front foot and attacking.
“To me that’s the European way, so it made it easier for me.”
When the pandemic struck, he left for home to be with his wife Cristel, son Brent, grandchildren Lowie (now 8) and Lotte (15 months), and his father Eugeen, who was ill at the time and has since passed.
The pandemic was financially squeezing soccer’s structure, and he didn’t have a job at first, but he soon started working with U-15s, U-18s and U-23s at OH Leuven where Borges played, and a year later he was hired back at Genk to help coach the U-16s; “an extremely talented group, the U-16 Belgian team was basically a Genk team.”
As a longtime club devotee, he was helping continue the Genk DNA for a new, younger coach, but in January 2025, both were fired because the results weren’t what was expected, and he left Genk after 32 years.
He pauses a moment before saying, “It was a difficult time, to be honest; inside you have a big black hole.”
But the director who had originally changed everything at Genk 20 years earlier called and asked Reynders to join him in the Netherlands with second-tier MVV Maastricht, just a short commute across the border from Genk. They had started to build a major project, but it was a low-budget club with little money for big plans, so in February he and Smyrniotis decided it would be a perfect time for Reynders to rejoin Forge.
“And it was like he never left,” Smyrniotis said. “We didn’t miss a beat.”
Forge had only three coaches in his first term here—Smyrniotis, Reynders and Johan Albert—and there are now five, with those three joined by Kit Selaidopoulos and George Kyriazis.
Reynders says that “It’s great to be back with a big club again. My curiosity was, ‘Can I help this team to keep on doing what they were doing?’, and a very important thing for me is, ‘Can I help the young talent guys from Sigma or other teams in our area to bring them into the first team of Forge?’ That’s my biggest job and biggest challenge, and also to keep this group hungry to do more and more.”
While the players back in 2019 “were mostly U-23,” it’s an older group now, sprinkled with promising young talent, and the evolution of the club has seen Forge players drawn from Canada and abroad, “to be developed and win hardware. Like Antoine (Batisse) and Dimitry (Bertaud), and they’re the best defender and best goalkeeper in the league, without a doubt. It’s attractive to players, the chance to win trophies and also to play in the Champions Cup.”
And in the slipstream of World Cup fever, can Canada learn anything from the widely acclaimed performances of Norway and Belgium, both of which have far fewer registered soccer players than this country does?
“I think we need more places like Forge for sure and more academies like Sigma where the development of youth titles doesn’t really mean anything,” Reynders said. “If you can do it (win) then do it, but development has to be at the top topic; change the way of developing young players; the game has changed all over the world so you have to not only be technical, you have to think faster and play faster.”