These Six U.S. Stars Were Rejected From Youth Teams. It Made Them Great.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_spot/2015/07/03/usa_v_japan_preview_carli_lloyd_morgan_brian_and_lauren_holiday_describe.html
Twelve-year-old Morgan Brian sat at the computer at a friend’s house, heart pounding as she went online to find out whether or not she had made Florida’s Olympic Development team. Brian, nicknamed “Plankton” by her teammates, thanks to her tiny size and her feistiness, wanted nothing more than to make the team. She remembers pulling up the list, frantically looking up and down the rows of names. Her name wasn’t there. All ten of her club teammates had made an A, B, or C team—everyone except for Brian.
“I definitely cried. I was so upset, so embarrassed—I remember just feeling like I must be the worst player on my team,” Brian told me before the start of this World Cup. In the summer, her entire team left for Montevallo, Alabama for the regional Olympic Development Program camp. Brian stayed home, but her failure would become her motivation. “It ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “It was the hardest I’d ever worked in my life.”
On Sunday, Brian and the U.S. women’s national team will face Japan for the Women’s World Cup title in a rematch of the 2011 World Cup final and the 2012 Olympic final. Brian is not the only U.S. player motivated by early rejection; her story is emblematic of the rest of the team. Five other key American stars described being cut—or not making the cut—at youth levels, and credit their drive to become the best soccer players on the planet to that rejection. The mental toughness that is so often ascribed to the Americans—the mentality that has allowed the Americans to win—is rooted in failure.
After failing to make the ODP team, Brian played constantly—doing two-v-twos on the St. Simon’s, Georgia beach where she grew up, playing pickup with the guys, trampling the crabs that crept out of the marsh as she worked on fundamentals in the driveway. Her best friend, Anna Barrow, remembers Brian’s fanatical training.