Anna Hall can remember her first “catastrophic failure” at sports, at least in her eyes. She was 12.
The reigning world champion at heptathlon comes from a family of athletes. Her father, David Hall, was a quarterback at Michigan. He also ran track and played basketball at the school in the early-to-mid-1980s.
Her older sisters, Kathryn and Julia, were athletes at Michigan, too.
“We grew up competing with each other, literally over everything: grades, who could learn how to ride a bike first,” Anna Hall tells USA TODAY Sports. “So I always knew I wanted to do sports just because I saw my sisters in it. I was constantly chasing them down, being three years behind. I was not as fast, but I was determined to catch up to them.”
Along with her sisters, Hall had qualified for a USA Track & Field junior national meet.
“To me, that was like the end of the world,” she says, “and I went just for high jump and I was so nervous, I didn’t even make a bar.”
She thought her dad was disappointed, but he took her to In-N-Out Burger after it was over, she says, “like it was a normal Wednesday.”
Looking back, she felt propelled forward.
“I know it’s not the end of the world,” says Hall, now 24. “No matter how this goes, I’m going to In-N-Out with my dad.
‘I’ve failed a lot. I think anybody that’s gone far in anything has.”
We feel we are in control of success and how it affects our lives. But what about failure?
Why, especially as young athletes and parents, do we usually dislike it so much? We spoke with Dinin (also a father of two) and Hall to gather 10 perspectives on failure you might not think about:
1. Let’s come out and say it: Failure (like losing) stinks. But that’s the point.
Dinin has become known as the ‘TikTok Professor’ for his bite-sized lessons about the importance of failure.
He has based his life on it as an English Ph. D-turned-software engineer who built venture-backed tech companies.
“One of the things I had to learn is, like, 98% of what’s gonna happen is not gonna to work the way you intended,” he says, “and it was a lesson that I didn’t (know) because I was a Duke undergrad way back when. And so I still had that mindset of everything has to be perfect. …
“You wind up with these kind of weird phrases like, ‘Fail fast’ and ‘embrace failure.’ And I’m like, ‘No, failure stinks. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’ It’s not good to fail. It’s just also not bad to fail. It’s just natural.”
Dinin was speaking with USA TODAY Sports in a video interview earlier this week from a symposium hosted by TrueSport and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. It focused on mental wellness and supportive sports systems.
TrueSport is a learning and teaching organization that operates with the understanding that sports is a lab for life, where athletes have unlimited opportunities for success and failure.
At the event, Dinin asked questions the way he dangles what he calls ‘failure challenges’ to his students.
Could you sell a Jolly Rancher for $100?
He told his class they had one hour to do it.
“Some of the students are gonna run around, they’re gonna embrace it, they’re gonna be trying to sell, they’re gonna be failing,” he says. “Some of them are gonna walk over to the coffee shop on campus and get themselves a croissant and a cappuccino and just sit there for an hour. And you might go, ‘Well, that kid didn’t do their work.’ No, actually, the only thing that matters isn’t what you did. It’s, ‘What does it teach you about yourself? And how can you use that information to put yourself in a position to be more successful in the future?’ ”
2. Sports are something we grow into, and they become self-motivating when we fall short
We can’t be scared to be wrong in venture capitalism. Doesn’t sports work the same way?
It’s a process we may not realize as we’re going through it – taking failures and losses really hard – but we do in time.
Hall goes back to the burger stop after she bombed that big meet.
“I remember years later when I started to become one of those athletes that loves pressure and thrived under pressure, I was like, ‘Oh, I needed that first experience of going to a meet that you perceive as the biggest deal ever and crashing out at it to learn how to be like, ‘OK, the next time I go, I know what the pressure is like, I know I’m ready for it,’ ” she says.
“It definitely needs to come from you. The expectations from my parents (David and Ronette) were always just mostly surrounding morals, saying thank you to my coach when I left practice and doing the drill they asked me to do as hard as I can do it.”
3. Education, and getting better at sports, means failure, or at least an A-
Dinin says Duke students are products of an education system managed through grades.
“If you don’t get that checkpoint, the worst thing that can happen is you fail the grade, you get held back,” Dinin says. “But in the rest of life, right, we have a very different relationship with failure. You don’t keep trying the same thing over and over again until you get it, until it works.
“We all still operate just the same way once we leave school. And so I think that’s a huge part of where our complex relationship with failure comes from.”
He offers incentives, instead, by giving students a poor mid-semester grade to see how they react.
“It’s always interesting to see which ones write me an email within 10 minutes of giving that grade, like, ‘I don’t understand,’ ” he says. “It’s designed that the good outcome is by the end of the semester.”
4. Criticism is ultimately what makes you better
Now, let’s look at the concept of failure through the lens of a Duke athlete.
“I say, hell hath no fury like a Duke student who gets an A-minus,” Dinin says. “Athletes take that lower grade and they go, ‘OK, what do I need to do to improve?’
“In the entrepreneurial world, athletes are some of the best students because they’re the ones who understand that you’re not gonna get things right the first time or the second or the third or the fourth or the 20th.’
As athletes, Dinin says, we come to realize the time horizons it takes to excel at something.
“They definitely understand the concept of trial and error and failure,” he says. “Anna Hall didn’t become incredible in a weekend. And she didn’t start incredible.”
5. If we love to do something, failure – and the right amount of pressure – can fuel us
Whichever sport Anna and her sisters tried – field hockey, lacrosse, swimming, basketball, track – they needed to do their best at them.
Her father, the three-sport college athlete, would hold them accountable to that standard. That was the pressure.
“If I was playing soccer, he’s like, ‘Well, then go kick the ball around in the backyard with your sister,’ ” Hall says. “And if I was like, ‘No, I don’t ever want to do that,’ then, ‘OK, like, maybe let’s not do soccer.’
“I think a small bit of pressure is actually really healthy because there’s pressure in all areas of life, whether that’s school, work. But it was geared towards doing what you love.”
6. When we have passion for something, failure is the motivator, not the deterrent
After about eighth grade, when Hall stopped playing soccer and pursued track full-time, she became consumed with the variety of the heptathlon’s events and the practice to perfect them.
When you love something, you can throw yourself into it, even if you get cut from a team. It’s not the same feeling as, say, preparing for an organic chemistry retake, which you might dread.
“At the Olympic Games or the world championships, it is fun because it’s the moment you’ve been dreaming of, but you really learn that the process and the day in and day out of enjoying practice and enjoying seeing yourself get better at something, that is really where your joy and development comes from,” Hall says. “I won the world championships this year and I’m super proud of that medal, but ultimately what made that moment special was all that went into it, not necessarily just standing on top of the podium.”
WHAT IS FUN? Sometimes, as a tennis star learned, it’s overcoming struggle
7. There isn’t a right answer – or a winner and loser – to everything
Before she became a world champion, Hall broke her foot during a fall in 2021, ahead of the Tokyo Olympics. She also had knee surgery in 2024, months before Paris.
“Honestly, my headspace was horrible,” she said at the symposium. “I think, people were always like, ‘Oh, how did you stay so positive?’ I didn’t. Every day, I was like, I don’t think this is going to work. I’m terrified.”
Dinin says athletes tend to have a sense there’s a winner and loser in every choice they make.
“Winning isn’t (always) whether or not you got the best time,” he says. “Winning is often what do you value the most?’
Sports is hard enough, Hall’s father used to tell her. It’s not worth it if you don’t love it, or dwell too much on wins and losses. Find the right team, or an energetic coach, that makes you want to come back no matter what.
“Having an injury on my takeoff legs, I was actually fearful to jump,” Hall says. “Every time I said I couldn’t do it, or I didn’t think it would work, there was five people telling me, ‘We’re gonna do this, and this is how.’ I think when you have people surrounding you speaking life into you like that, it’s almost like they forced me to believe in myself.”
8. Sometimes bodies fail, and we have to be patient
Dinin has a women’s basketball player in class who tore her ACL right before the season started. She feels like a failure, he says, because so much of her identity is tied to her sport.
Perhaps you have a kid with a similar injury, or even a repeat injury, and they have been forced to be patient.
“Athletes really struggle with (that),’ Dinin says. ‘They get injured and it just totally changes who they are because it’s all they know. It’s like, ‘It’s OK, bodies fail.’ This is again, something that we get taught in school, right? Perfect attendance.”
After having knee surgery the year of the Paris Olympics, Hall took time to reflect on how she could avoid putting herself in that situation again. The answer: taking a break.
Following her world championships win, she took five weeks off from physical activity, with the exception of an occasional Pilates class.
“For a professional athlete that’s really unheard of,” she says. “But my coaches (said) no, it’s really important to actually get out of shape a little bit, let your body heal itself and then the fitness will come back. I was super sore those first few days, but I didn’t lose everything.”
9. Turn off the ‘parent brain’: Being the best doesn’t necessarily mean being successful
Dinin says he fails daughters Adeline, 10, and Imogen, 7, when he relies too much on what he calls “parent brain.”
He can sit with students who tell him they don’t like their classes to prepare them to become a physician or lawyer and say, “It’s OK, there’s so many jobs in the world. Go into visual media studies.”
But when his kindergartner or first-grader comes home and tells him she didn’t do well on her addition? Forget painting. You’ve got to be really good at math and science.
“I’m like, ‘No, you gotta go be a doctor because that’s the stable profession,’ ” he says. “And so, I have to imagine the same thing happens for parents of youth sports. Objectively, we can sit back and say, ‘Hey, it’s OK. Things work out. People get to where they need.’
“But then when you’re that parent, watching that kid on the soccer field and that kid’s maybe hoping for a scholarship or (to) get on the traveling team or whatever it is, and then suddenly all that goes out the window and you just want them to be the best instead of be successful.”
10. Failure is a synonym for learning, and learning is everywhere
Hall is focused on Los Angeles in 2028, looking at her injuries as blips, and building blocks of learning.
It’s the way Dinin challenges his students to think. The final exam is based on a list of tasks he hands out at the beginning of the semester, such as pen-spinning, juggling or playing the harmonica.
He holds a talent show based on how well you learn your new skill.
“Usually the way every student learns is the night before they cram,” he says. “But that’s actually the worst kind of learning you can do. The best kind of learning is slow, methodical every time, bit by bit. And there’s just no way you can become a great juggler in one night. And so, you can really see whether or not they have figured out how to embody this lesson of slow, incremental, failure-based learning.”
A good outcome, he said, is that by the end of the semester, the student doesn’t care what their grade is. Really.
“When I make everything about a grade, it just totally undercuts the class,” he says. “No matter where you are, the best university in the world or anywhere else, you are going to be failing all the time. (It) means you have access to education all the time.”
Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.