What USA Women’s World Cup Coach Jill Ellis Can Teach Us About Taking Risks

It takes a lot of guts to do what Jill Ellis is doing. The US Women National Soccer coach has guided her squad into the quarterfinals of the FIFA Women’s World Cup with an enormous match today against host nation France. The winner will be one of four teams left.

But that’s not the hard part. The hard part has been how they’ve accomplished getting here these last few years.

Ellis, the former head coach at UCLA, was tapped to lead the US team in 2014. Ellis knew the hours and the travel would be long, but the chance to coach the USA’s greatest female players in the sport was too much to pass up.

The English-born Ellis led the team to the 2015 World Cup title. Everything was good.

The good vibes didn’t last long, however. Expectations were high – always the case when your team is ranked tops in the world – as they headed to the Olympics in Rio. But there they suffered a crushing defeat to Sweden on penalty kicks. Controversial US goalie Hope Solo, known for her strong opinions, called the Swedish team “a bunch of cowards” after the loss. Criticism rained down about poor play and poor sportsmanship.

Ellis looked at the USWNT program and knew changes were in order. Unpleasant changes. The kind that would make headlines and hurt feelings.

She decided that the team needed to shuffle its roster—leaving behind of some of the most famous members—in order to embrace a more diverse style of play. She added and moved players with limited success, and some fans of the team called for her dismissal. Ellis shifted players to new positions, brought in younger talent, and even cut some of the team’s more famous veterans, a move very unpopular with team sponsors.

Soon enough, the experiment yielded results. As the improvements continued, expectations of the team for the 2019 World Cup grew.

Carli Lloyd, a forward for the team, summed it up this way: “Anything less than a championship is a bust.”

With an early 13-0 victory over Thailand, things looked good. Then came a 3-0 win over Chile, a 2-0 win over Sweden, and a tense 2-1 win over Spain.

Despite the victories, the critics have been strong. They don’t like her substitutions. They question some of her strategies. People worry whether or not Ellis can keep the momentum rolling.

One of the critics was Solo, one of those stars whose contract with the team wasn’t renewed. She told the BBC on June 8 that Ellis “is not the leader I wish she would be. She relies heavily on her assistant coaches. She cracks under pressure quite a bit. But it oftentimes doesn’t matter because the quality of the players on the US team is superb.”

Keep in mind, she’s talking about the team that Ellis rebuilt. A team that is so far 4-0 in World Cup play, with 20 goals for and 1 goal against.

But that is the price you pay for Greatness. It’s also why Ellis’ work is so remarkable. She could have stuck with what worked before. She could have ridden the star system the national team had developed.

Instead, Ellis blew it up in order to follow her vision of something greater. A vision that not everyone else could see—indeed, a vision that some still can’t see.

How often do you or I have that level of courage and commitment? I know I tend to drift into places where I’m comfortable; taking unnecessary risks is sometimes difficult to do, especially when—as a leader—I know I have a team relying on my good judgment to keep us all employed.

But I also know that complacency—or worse, stagnation—is just as destructive, and sometimes more so. The long, slow slide into irrelevance often carries a higher cost than the short-term price of a big calculated risk.

Sometimes, you just have to take a deep breath and make the leap.

When was the last time you stepped out of your comfort zone or challenged yourself to change something you knew wasn’t working?

You can’t make an impact if you play it safe all the time. Safety is the harbor of ships that will never sail. If you want to experience the thrill, you’ve got to raise the sail and get out on the high seas. Sure, there’s danger, but there’s also something Greater.

That’s the choice Ellis has made. The USWNT will play France in a game with no safety net: at this stage of the World Cup, it’s lose and go home. The pressure is insane, the expectations immense, and Ellis is putting all of her chips on the changes her gut told her to make three years ago.

I’m with her.