In April 2015, Crystal Dunn was driving down the highway with her parents when her phone rang. It was Jill Ellis, the head coach of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. Dunn had spent three months in training camp competing for a spot on their World Cup roster. She was 22, a Hermann Trophy winner, and a U-20 World Cup champion. She was confident that she would make the cut and make the US World Cup Team.
She didn’t. Dunn was the last player cut that year. She ended up player number 24 for a 23-person roster.
“I was just in this weird place,” Dunn later wrote in The Players’ Tribune, “where I had just gotten really bad news and I couldn’t tell anyone.” When the roster was publicly announced a few days later, she turned off her phone, and then she took a two-hour nap. When she woke up, it was flooded with messages: I’m so sorry about what happened to you.
What followed since that negative event wasn’t a collapse. It was her transformation. Dunn channeled her own disappointment into an NWSL season that saw her score 15 goals, win the Golden Boot, and earn a league MVP. She became the youngest player ever to win both awards. Four years later, she made the 2019 US Women’s World Cup roster and she started at left back for a team that ultimately won the championship.
Her story isn’t unique either. Every athlete, at every level, faces moments when their performance doesn’t meet with their expectations. The difference between those who spiral and those who recover isn’t talent. It’s what they do next.
What Failure Actually Means
Kobe Bryant was once asked directly: what does failure mean to you?
His answer was blunt: “It doesn’t exist. It’s a figment of your imagination. The point is, the story continues. So if you fail on Monday, the only way it’s a failure is if you decide to not progress from that. If I fail today, I’m gonna learn something from that failure, and I’m gonna try again Tuesday. The worst possible thing you could ever have is to stop and to not learn.”
As a side note, he was famous for wearing number 24 for the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. He said the 24 represented the 24 hours in a day and that he wanted to be grateful for every moment in a day.
He’s a real Champion and he offered a rather interesting approach or framework here. A game that’s been played badly can often turn into a full-blown failure if an athlete lets it get to them & starts to see it as a total write-off, rather than as a chance to gather some valuable information and use it for them to get better. It’s a lot easier for athletes to bounce back from that if they can grasp this idea early on. On the other hand, those athletes who don’t figure this out might see themselves stuck having to learn the hard way through their own experiences.
Acknowledge Your Emotions and Your Feelings
After a bad performance, most people just want to downplay it and brush it off. They will try to pretend it never happened, but the truth is that it did hurt. And trying to just ignore the pain won’t make it go away, it might just put off a reckoning for the time being.
When Dunn was cut from that World Cup squad, she really needed someone to talk through it with. She just couldn’t even watch the tournament. Everyone on the team knew how close she had been to the whole thing and to making the team that year. She was also very far from her family, her loved ones, so she had no one to turn to. Her emotions, she said, were just all over the place, like a rollercoaster.
She found an unlikely outlet: Pierre Soubrier, a French athletic trainer working for her NWSL club. They weren’t close yet, but he became her sounding board. He would listen to her vent. Then, he would give her honest feedback. And, he also reminded her that she was talented. But, he didn’t let her wallow in self pity. As Dunn later told Sports Illustrated, “He helped me see that this was the beginning of my new chapter.”
Research also supports this approach. Sports psychologist Dr. Patrick Cohn, who has worked with athletes for over 30 years, emphasizes that talking through a bad performance, with a coach, a teammate, or trusted friend, can help athletes to express and unpack their difficult emotions. So, the goal is not to dwell in self pity. Rather, the goal is to drain that emotion so that it doesn’t contaminate everything that follows, kind of like venting.
Treat It Like Data
Once the initial sting fades, then the best athletes will shift into their analysis mode. They review what happened, not to punish themselves, but to learn from it. One of my friends wanted to go to Graduate School for Sports Psychology in order to study this aspect of athletic competition. Specifically, he was interested in researching how to help baseball batters get out of their hitting slumps when they were in one.
U.S. Soccer striker Jozy Altidore, reflecting on difficult stretches during his career, put it this way: “You are going to go through tough times. In a career in soccer, a lot of it is mental. You have to stay strong at the tough moments because there are going to be a lot of them.”
His approach was that after a rough patch, he said to focus on what you can control going forward. “Nobody cares about what you did a year or two or three years ago,” Altidore said. “It’s what you do now.” This is an ongoing issue in professional and collegiate sports.
That means you can ask yourself specific questions and then reply with specific answers. Where did the performance break down? Why did it break down? What was within your control, and what wasn’t within your control? Manchester United’s Michael Carrick, who battled depression for two years after his team’s 2009 Champions League Final loss to Barcelona, said he eventually learned to separate the things he could change from the things he couldn’t change. The loss was devastating to him, but the path forward required him to be honest in his assessment and to not endlessly blame himself.
For younger athletes who don’t have access to game footage the process can be a whole lot simpler: just write down three things that went wrong during the game and what one single thing you can change for each to improve. For example, “instead of staring at the ball on the second goal, I should have been tracking the runner” that’s a fair statement with a useful action included. “Played really poorly” isn’t a sentence that’s going to help anyone figure out a solution to anything.
Rebuilding Your Confidence Takes Work
Confidence probably won’t simply magically return after a bad game. You’ve got to put in some effort to get your confidence back.
Jesse Lingard, the English midfielder who had a really tough time for a while, credits his brother Louie for helping him turn things around. During that tough patch, he spent his time watching videos of his old youth football career with his brother. Together, they watched him play with Manchester United U21s and the England squad. Louie’s constant encouragement, “Have a look at this! Watch that one!” got him back on the right track. Lingard later remembered: “I looked back and thought, ‘You know what? I can’t just give all of this up’. It gave me a renewed sense of confidence.”
This is called pattern interruption, the technique of reminding yourself of past successes when you’re stuck in a vicious cycle of negative thoughts after a bad game. Sometimes seeing evidence of your past abilities can help you to snap out of that cycle.
Crystal Dunn took a similar approach to rebuilding her confidence. Instead of trying to prove herself through some big flashy gesture after getting cut, she just went back to her NWSL team and then she focused on playing well game by game. The more she did that, the more her confidence started to grow back. And, by the end of the season, she was playing like the player who had just won the NWSL MVP award.
Use Your Mind Like a Training Tool
Olympic distance runner Alexi Pappas represented Greece in the 10,000 meters at the 2016 Rio Olympics. She also set a national record. It should have been the peak of her life. But instead, what followed was a severe clinical depression that left her barely functioning.
“We might think that depression strikes only when bad things happen,” Pappas said in a New York Times video essay, “but for me, it happened right after the pinnacle of my life.”
Her recovery ended up teaching her something crucial about her own relationship between mental and physical training. A psychiatrist helped her to reframe her condition into terms that she could understand: “He told me, ‘Lex, you have an injury, but instead of on your body, it’s in your brain.'” That was a shift in perspective. Here, treating mental health with the same seriousness as a torn hamstring was transformative.
Pappas now emphasizes visualization as a part of her training. Before competitions, she mentally rehearses not just the success, but also the adversity as well. She imagines how she’ll respond if something goes wrong early. “I include what could go wrong, too,” she’s explained. “I visualize giving the ball away and then immediately pressing to win it back.”
Research into sports psychology confirms this approach. Studies have shown that when athletes visualize performance, they can activate the same neural pathways used during physical execution. But, this mental rehearsal is not a substitute for training, it’s an extension of it.
Dr. Patrick Cohn of Peak Performance Sports recommended visualizing with all five of the athlete’s senses, from a first-person perspective. Feel the grass under your feet. Hear the crowd. Experience the emotions of executing well. The more vivid the imagery, the more effective the preparation is supposed to be.
Don’t Recover Alone
Olympic running coach Bobby McGee, who has worked with elite athletes for decades, observed a pattern: athletes who get sick or injured and miss training often perform better than expected when they return. This was because they had no expectations weighing them down. But give those same athletes a full training block and high expectations? They would often underperform.
“It’s the weight of expectation without complementary training for the brain that undermines many athletes,” McGee told Marathon & Beyond.
One antidote to that weight is external perspective. When you’re too close to a bad performance to see it clearly, other people can help.
Dunn reached out to McCall Zerboni, her club teammate, after Zerboni was cut from the 2019 World Cup roster. This was the same position Dunn had been in four years earlier. “Obviously I’ve been in a similar boat,” Dunn said. “It’s good to give them a bit of space, but then also let them know that you’re thinking of them.”
Pappas credits her father with making her get professional help when her depression was at its worst. “That’s what I needed,” she said on NPR. “And then when my doctor helped me understand that my brain was a body part, just like my leg is, and it could get injured like any other body part, and it could also heal like any other body part. Suddenly, it wasn’t about Olympian or not, or superhero or not. It was just: this body needs to heal.”
Keep The Longer View in Mind
One bad game doesn’t define a season. One bad season doesn’t define a career.
Crystal Dunn went from being the last player cut in 2015 to starting at left back in the 2019 World Cup final, a game that the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team won. In 2024, she won Olympic gold in Paris.
Alexi Pappas went from post-Olympic depression so severe she couldn’t sleep to writing a bestselling memoir, Bravey, and becoming one of running’s most prominent mental health advocates.
Kobe was right: the story continues. A bad performance is only a failure if you decide to stop. And, if you don’t learn anything. If you don’t adjust. Or, if you don’t show up the next day ready to put the work in.
“The biggest lesson from 2015,” Dunn reflected years later, “was that all I can do is control my attitude and how I feel about myself. Whenever I started to doubt myself, no good could come from it. So these last four years have really been about me trying hard to never doubt myself, not even for one moment, and always remembering that if I stay the course, I will end up where I want to be.”
This is not complicated, but the hard part is doing this consistently, when you’re tired, when you’re discouraged, when the results haven’t shown yet. That’s when a lot of people quit.
Stay the course, and you will make it past the hard parts.
Sources and Further Reading:
Crystal Dunn, “The Call,” The Players’ Tribune (June 2016)
Crystal Dunn interview, Sports Illustrated (May 2019)
Kobe Bryant on failure, via Sports Illustrated (May 2023)
Alexi Pappas, Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas (2021)
Alexi Pappas interview, NPR’s All Things Considered (January 2021)
Dr. Patrick Cohn, Peak Performance Sports: peaksports.com
Dr. Alan Goldberg, Competitive Advantage: competitivedge.com
Association for Applied Sport Psychology: appliedsportpsych.org
