Let me get this straight. Ms. Martinez posted a video thanking her mother for all of her effort as part of a USSF promotion encouraging people to thank those who've helped them reach their goals. She's committed to UCLA, recently played in Portugal for the GNT, gets good grades and is very well spoken. Everyone in the video is happy with their decision, and the amount of effort they put in shows the type of character and traits (dedication, discipline, organization, etc.) that most can only hope for in their own children. In short, she seems like the perfect kid if you're into soccer. From this, a bunch of people on Twitter (and here) feel the need to criticize her family and USSF as if either of them are doing something wrong? It makes you wonder who's actually wasting time, Ms. Martinez's mother driving or the morons here and on Twitter criticizing someone else's success. Seriously,
@younothat and
@broshark have posted at this site alone 788 and 1487 times respectively, and goodness knows how much time they've wasted on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
If you have a problem with this video, you're the person with the problem. To the extent you're criticizing her family's decision, by all means explain how your kids stack up in comparison. How're they doing in school, where are they committed to college, do they play on the GNT, and how much scholarship money are they getting? How do you spend four hours a day more productively (other than wasting it online criticizing other people's successes, which we already know about)? Do you have the luxury of not having to drive your kid 2 hours to a club that can help meet her goals because you live in the Southern California, the area with the greatest concentration of girls youth soccer talent and elite soccer clubs in the world? And if you're worried she is going to die young because she consistently gets 4 hours of sleep, go back and actually pay attention to what the mother said. On "some nights" she has gotten 4 hours of sleep, which you would expect on occasion from any motivated and hard working kid regardless of whether its sports, academics or some other interest. Regardless, by the time she's "at risk" in her 50s, it'll have been 32 years since she last lost any sleep commuting to Lonestar.
If you think the DA and USSF soccer did something wrong here, the truth is the DA didn't exist when Ms. Martinez started going to Lonestar, so how can this be the DA's fault? It certainly isn't USSF's fault that Lonestar has a solid club, while those in San Antonio just aren't great and can't help her develop to the same level. Sure, it would be nice if San Antonio had a club like Lonestar, but it doesn't, and it's not USSF's fault for not instantly creating one out of thin air in the DA's first year of existence. Do you expect USSF to pay Zidane a billion dollars and then drop him into San Antonio to coach a girls youth club just because the city hasn't produced great soccer players historically? Should USSF approve at least one soccer club for DA within 30 minutes of every child in America? Maybe it should just make every club in America great so no one needs to travel anywhere? Probably the best solution is that USSF should stop promoting its DA entirely because a bunch of trolls who need anti-depressants are just going to inevitably rip on it regardless of how heartwarming the story. What exactly do you want USSF to do differently?
