When Houston Dash forward Kealia Ohai prepares a shot, everything disappears. There's just her, and the ball, and the ball's path to the goal.

"I can really calm myself and relax myself and just place the ball like I know how to do it," she explains. "Like I do every day in practice, and not really freak out about what's going on around me."

These days, Ohai has plenty of thoughts to push to the side. So far, it's been a lousy season. After a breakout performance last year, her stats so far are underwhelming. In nine games, she's scored only two goals. And her team is dead last in the National Women's Soccer League.

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That would be enough to distract any athlete. But on top of that, Ohai is dealing with fame. Not just women's-soccer fame -- a tame, pleasant recognition -- but a fame that burns much hotter. Last year, Ohai became known not as an athlete, but as J.J. Watt's girlfriend.

In the fall, after she confirmed that she was dating the football superstar, they were labeled "Houston's hottest celebrity couple." Instagram photos of the pair consistently topped 100,000 likes, becoming news themselves. Modern Luxury magazine ran a spread on Ohai's beauty secrets. Reporters asked post-game questions not about her performance, but about her boyfriend.

None of which comes naturally to her. Ohai never aimed to be an it-girl. She's here to be the best soccer player in the world.

In Ohai's pre-shot tunnel vision, as she pulls back her leg to kick, the Dash's lousy record doesn't matter. Her stats don't matter. Her boyfriend doesn't matter.

In her mind, the ball is already in the goal.

Everything else is noise.

Soccer prodigy

Ohai is blind in one eye, and as a kid, she was small for her age. But even so, her physical gifts showed up early.

"We have videos from when she was maybe like 18 months, where she would stand on her head," says Ohai's older sister, Megan Cushing. "They would film her -- for like 30 minutes -- standing on her head. And she could, like, spin and move her legs."

Around age 3, before Ohai could tie her shoes, she started pee-wee soccer. She scored 18 goals in her first game.

"At halftime, everyone would be talking," Cushing remembers. "And all of a sudden, they would switch her jersey to the other team to even things out."

Ohai's mental game showed up later. Even as a kid, she gravitated toward books about psychology and self-growth, and they worked. She set high goals. She rebounded from setbacks.

In her junior year, she led the University of North Carolina to a national championship. A year and a half later, in 2014, the Dash drafted her as the team's first-ever pick.

But she was aiming higher still. Soon after she moved to Houston, she read the book "What to Say When You Talk to Your Self."

"I think everyone should read it," says Ohai, who wears book recommendations on her sleeve. "It talks about how everything you are is what you say to yourself. You create whoever you are, and your circumstances."

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Now each day she opens a journal and writes to herself — just as the book suggests. Mostly it's her goals and how to reach them.

"It's important to me to have a goal," she says. "But then you have to break it down and have smaller goals. You can't just write, 'I want to be the best player in the world.'"

"A big goal for me is, I want to be the NWSL MVP and to be a leading scorer. To win a championship with this team. And I break it down, until I get to my ultimate goal, which is to win a World Cup and to win an Olympics, and to be the best player in the world."

She envisions those goals already in the bag. "Don't say what you want to be," she says. "You should say, 'I am the best player in the world. I won the World Cup. I am the NWSL MVP and the lead scorer.' You tell your mind who you are and you start to work toward that."

Ohai keeps her journal on the nightstand in her Houston bedroom — which is in her sister's home. (It's a big house: Cushing is married to Texans linebacker Brian Cushing.) And what sister can resist flipping through another's diary?

"It's pages and pages of 'I am the best athlete in the world.' 'I am this.' 'I am positive.' Over, and over and over again," Cushing says. "And I think she's taught herself to believe it. I don't think a lot of girls are taught to believe that — to think that way. I think it makes a difference for her."

Except, of course, when it doesn't. And the question is, what then?

Accidental it-girl

It's easy when everything is going right. Last season, everything was coming up Kealia.

She earned a coveted call-up to the national team, where she set a record by scoring 48 seconds into her on-field debut. At Dash games, she sank everything.

"There were some goals where I was literally trying to cross it, and it would just go in the goal," she remembers. "Everything was working out for me. Everything was falling for me."

In October, she confirmed the rumors in a radio interview: She and Watt were a couple.

"In these last few months, people are starting to figure out who she is because of these other reasons," says Cushing. "And it's been hard. She's, like, the most private person. For her to post on social media — she hates it. She just doesn't like that. She doesn't like being in the scene."

Ohai doesn't even like being awake when the scene is taking place.

"I haven't been out in probably four years," she says, laughing. "It's not even a thought. Like, I go to bed at 8:30 most nights."

Luckily, Watt is similarly disciplined.

"If you don't understand that, you're like, 'What? This is so boring,'" she says. "But we don't do anything. We just recover and go to bed so we can train early the next day. And I think that helps. It's nice to be around that, and people who understand that."

Not everything about being J.J. Watt's girlfriend is as easy.

"She'll never say anything," says Cushing. "But she'll get interviewed after games, and they'll ask her things about her personal life. And she feels like, 'If I just finished a game, and you're interviewing me, it should be about the game.'"

The Bright Side

Last month was not a good one for Ohai. When the latest roster for the women's national team was set, she was overlooked. In a home game with Portland — a loss — she was pulled out of the game with about 20 minutes left to play. (Ask her why that happened, and she'll tell you that's a great question). And earlier this month, when Washington goalie Stephanie Labbé denied her a goal, it didn't take much lip reading to deduce the expletive Ohai screamed.

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"There are a lot of things — a lot of politics that haven't played out in her favor," says Cushing, herself a former soccer star at the University of Southern California.

"I get like, 'Are you kidding me? How could that girl make that roster over you? This is ridiculous!'' And Kealia's like, 'It's fine. I just have to stay positive and keep going,'" Cushing says. "I wish I was like that. I wonder what I could have accomplished if I had her mentality."

Somehow, Ohai always finds a way to spin these setbacks until she's back on the bright side. She's already ahead of where she was this time last year, she notes: "One thing that I keep telling myself is last season – eight games in, maybe 10 games in, I didn't have a single goal, and maybe one assist."

She smiles. She's not imagining that the season will turn around. She's telling herself that it already has.