Letting Go of Perfect
Post Soccer Reflections
It’s been more than two years since my last soccer game, and it’s just starting to sink in. I can remember thinking it at the time — I can remember the final whistle blowing, walking off the field, taking off my jersey — but only now has it really hit me. I’m done. I’m really done.
My name is Haley Rosen. I played soccer at Stanford and went on to have a brief professional career both in the US and abroad. Because I’m not famous and you’ve never heard of me, I can be honest about this: I used to be pretty good at soccer.
I was a top recruit coming out of high school. I played for arguably the best club in the country, and had started on multiple youth national teams. And because you’ve never heard of me, you can probably figure out that I was also a total bust.
I am, and always have been, a perfectionist. Like so many things, being a perfectionist is a double-edged sword — the same obsessive passion that drove me to take 200 shots a day or always run “one more” also kept me up at night after every game wondering if I could have played just a little better, if I could have done just a little more. Being a perfectionist means that if something doesn’t happen exactly as planned, it’s really hard for me to just “roll with the punches.”
And by the time I was 13, I had the perfect life plan. First, I was going to get myself into a top college soccer program. Then I would be a four year starter, score a million goals, and get invited to the US senior national team. World Cup titles, Olympic gold medals, and Nike commercials were to follow.
Cliché as such a dream might sound, it was mine, and I was willing to do whatever it took to make it happen. When I was offered a spot at Stanford, I checked the first step off. Now I had to prove I was ready to start.
Going into my freshman preseason I trained harder than I ever had in my life. I was fitter, stronger, and more game-ready than ever before. And I did exactly what I intended. I came into the program and made an impression — I crushed fitness testing, scored a ton of goals in training, and quickly found myself playing with the starting group.
Everything was going right, until one day I felt a sharp twinge in my leg. I ignored it. I kept competing. I pushed myself as hard as I could. And then my hamstring tore.
Just like that, I was watching the rest of my freshman season from the sidelines. It was the first time I’d ever been seriously injured, and to be completely honest, I fell apart. Rather than accept the fact that I couldn’t play and use the extra time to adjust to college life, I fell into a serious depression. I beat myself up continually thinking about how this wasn’t a part of the plan. This wasn’t how my career was supposed to go.
The season went on, games were won and lost, and I did nothing. I watched. I waited. I developed anxiety. It seems silly in retrospect, as so much anxiety does. But at the time, it got so bad that I seriously considered taking time off school or even transferring. I hadn’t even completed my first quarter of college. But because things weren’t going according to plan, it felt like my life was crumbling to pieces.
When I finally came back from that injury, something essential had changed in my approach. My confidence had been shaken, and every time I stepped foot on the field, it seemed like the fate of my entire career was at stake. The joy and freedom I had always felt while playing had been replaced with an anxious obsession to prove I could recover my perfect life plan.
But I never did.
Looking back, it would be easy to blame the injuries. They followed me throughout college and the pros. Torn ligaments in my ankle and my knees. A concussion that stayed with me for more than a year. A torn labrum in my hip.
In the end, I managed to play just one full season during college — and it was my fifth year. As a pro, I didn’t even manage that. But looking back, it’s not the injuries I think about. It’s the mindset I took when I was healthy enough to play.
Yes, I had some good moments. I scored some nice goals, competed in the College Cup, and was mainly a starter who saw a lot of minutes when I was healthy. But all that time, I was “squeezing” my soccer career. I trained only out of fear that I might be out of shape. I played cautious and safe, passing up shots I would have absolutely taken when I was younger. I lost the freedom to even effectively go 1 on 1. There was too much thinking involved. I could never let go and just play.
At some point, I stopped competing against anyone else. I was just battling myself every time I played, my nerves, my self-doubt, the pieces of the life-plan I was still carrying around.
The injuries didn’t help, but the reality is I never let myself be as good as I could be. I was never the athlete I could have been. After all those years of obsessing over perfection, I got in my own way, and I failed.
In a lot of ways, founding Just Women’s Sports mirrored the beginning of my college career. I had huge ambitions for the company from day one and was desperate to make it a success. Not just for my own sake, but because I truly, deeply believe that women’s sports needs a dedicated media platform. But as with any company, there were inevitably setbacks early on. And as we navigated our own initial road bumps, I could feel myself falling into my old defeatist mindset. Each mistake seemed like a deathblow, and as every minor thing chipped away at my confidence, I started to question if I was the right person to build this.
The same perfectionist thoughts had returned.
But this time, I knew what would happen if I let them take over my life. My own soccer career was all the evidence I needed to understand that they weren’t going to help either me or this company.
Of course, you can’t just turn off perfectionism by flipping a switch. You can’t just tell yourself to only think helpful thoughts. And there isn’t one single, decisive moment when you turn everything over in your mind and become a totally different person.
Instead, there is a daily refusal to fall victim to an old pattern of thought. And with Just Women’s Sports, that’s what I’m choosing to do. I know we’re not going to be perfect. We’re going to have plans that come apart. We’re going to make mistakes. But instead of kicking ourselves, we’re going to use these mistakes as opportunities to reflect and get better. There is too much potential and excitement surrounding women’s sports right now for us to focus on anything but all the positive energy filling the space. There are so many athletes and fans that want us to succeed, that we’d be doing them a disservice if we didn’t approach each day with determined joy and positivity.
Did I personally need to have my athletic dreams crushed in order to learn that obsessing over a perfect plan would inevitably backfire? I don’t know. The reality is that a part of me will probably never get over how my soccer career played out, no matter what it taught me. But that’s my story. I know I can’t change it. But I also don’t have to repeat it.
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