The following is excerpted from HEAD IN THE GAME by Brandon Sneed. Copyright 2017 by Brandon Sneed. Used by permission of Dey Street Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
In 2008, Olympic beach volleyball superstar Kerri Walsh Jennings and her partner, Misty May-Treanor, won gold at the Beijing Summer Olympics. That was Walsh Jennings’s second gold medal. But then, in 2009, she watched as, in her words, her life “fell apart.” She was married to a fellow volleyball player, and she was pregnant with their first child—but she was constantly on edge, or distracted, or otherwise not a good version of herself, and the result, she says, is that she and her husband were “on the verge of walking away from each other.