Alex Ediñger ☧

Tyler Simmons was onsides.

[CatholicVote @CatholicVote]

"What advice would you give to someone who's newly married or about to be?"

A profoundly moving moment on Pints with Aquinas as Matt Fradd asks the question to Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, who had just lost his wife of over 60 years.

Unforgettable.

[Sam Mahmood @TheSammahmood_]

The U.S. soccer federation is a poor return on invested capital.

I played soccer for 20+ years.

Grassroots.
Academy.
D1 college.
Pursued professionally after.

And I’ll say the quiet part out loud:

The US soccer infrastructure is broken.

In America, we treat playing D1 soccer like it is the peak achievement.

For most families, clubs, coaches, and players, the entire youth soccer machine is built around one goal:

Get recruited.
Get a scholarship.
Play college soccer.

But if the objective is to produce world-class players, D1 soccer is a terrible development path.

From 18-22, some of the most important technical development years of your career, you are preparing for a 3-4 month season built largely around athleticism, direct play, set pieces, fitness, and survival.

Now compare that to an 18-year-old in Spain, Argentina, Morocco, Italy, England, or France.

That player has likely been in a professional environment for years.

Training daily.
Playing meaningful matches year-round.
Competing against grown professionals.
Getting thousands more touches.
Learning how to solve the game under pressure.

The gap is massive.

And it shows.

American players are usually athletic.
They are usually fit.
They usually compete hard.

But at the highest levels, that is not enough.

The biggest difference is technical comfort.

We do not move the ball like Spain.
We do not combine like Argentina.
We do not play with the same fluidity, rhythm, and confidence you see from countries where the game is embedded into the culture from childhood.

That comes down to volume.

Volume of touches.
Volume of street soccer.
Volume of futsal.
Volume of unstructured play.
Volume of high-level training environments.
Volume of meaningful games.

In the US, youth soccer is expensive, overly organized, overly coached, tournament-driven, and too often built around winning games at 13 instead of developing players for 23.

Parents spend thousands.
Clubs charge thousands.
Travel teams fly all over the country.
Showcases become the product.
Recruiting becomes the scoreboard.

But the return on invested capital is poor.

We probably spend more money on youth soccer than almost any country in the world, yet the technical output does not match the investment.

That is a broken operating model.

And like any business, if the output is weak, you do not blame the customer.

You inspect the system.

The US has talent.
The US has athletes.
The US has money.
The US has facilities.

But the foundation is wrong.

We built a pay-to-play, college-recruiting machine and confused it for a world-class player development system.

Those are not the same thing.

Until we fix the grassroots layer, increase meaningful touches, make development less dependent on family income, and stop treating college soccer as the top of the mountain, the US will keep underperforming relative to its resources.

I’m not saying this to trash US Soccer.

I’m saying it because I lived it.

And if we actually want to become a powerhouse, we have to be honest about the infrastructure first.

[Catholic Arena @CatholicArena]

The remains of Saint Francis of Assisi will be displayed publicly for the first time in 800 YEARS this coming Sunday

[Catholic Answers @catholiccom]

LAST-MINUTE LENT IDEAS:

-Pray with maximum attention. For instance, repeat a bead or mystery on the Rosary if you were distracted.

-Put your phone in greyscale.

-Wake up an hour earlier.

-Give up earbuds.

-Give up listening to secular music.

-Give up social media.

-If leaving social media cold turkey is too hard, limit yourself to fifteen minutes per day across ALL platforms.

-Give up alcohol.

-Read the daily Gospel and pray before getting ready for work.

-Before watching TV/movie each day, read a spiritually efficacious book for a designated time. For instance, read for half the time you plan to watch. Before a ninety-minute movie, read for forty-five minutes.

-Consume Catholic media instead of watching your favorite TV show.

-Say a short prayer before a fun activity.

-Give up YouTube.

-Giving up wearing jewelry (except wedding rings).

-Give up clothes you never wear and donate them.

-Fast according to the norms before 1966 (https://t.co/XiQAU7OnaK).

-Make/renew the Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary.

-Pray the rosary on your commute.

-Ask others how you can pray for them.

-Gratitude-journaling each morning and night.

-Tune into Catholic Answers Live and share something you learned with a friend/family member.

-Reflect on an image of one mystery of the holy rosary each night.

-Don’t tell anybody what your penances are.

[Elijah Holyfield @EH_taught_me]

Kirby's the man.

#holyfieldwarrior #Boxing #WWE #WWENXT

[Joshua Charles🇻🇦 @JoshuaTCharles]

Anti-Christendom must have its own anti-monstrance to blaspheme the actual Eucharist.

[Everything Georgia @GAFollowers]

Video footage of the emergency landing in Gainesville, Georgia today.

[Hall County Sheriff @HallCountySO]

From 𝗚𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘃𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 – Browns Bridge Road is shut down at Pearl Nix Parkway. A single-engine plane conducted an emergency landing in the road. Minor injuries are reported. Expect extended traffic delays. https://t.co/HCoGDnhvPO

[ATLSCOOP @ATL_SCOOP]

Gainesville, GA — plane lands on road, reportedly hit 2 cars, pilot is ok according to witnesses

[Alex Ediñger ☧ @TheEdinger]

@WhaleEverything @NoLimitGains @grok DONE

[Garga.eth (Greg Solano) @CryptoGarga]

my grandmother was an educator, started a private school in Havana in the 50s and worked as the principal

taught some English classes at night for adults as well

so obviously Castro's goons took possession of the school after 1959

which to have your dream that you built from nothing taken from you and given to complete idiots who burn it down in short order is one thing

but the most humiliating aspect of the whole ordeal that my grandmother would talk about was more specific than that

it was having men show up at her door, after everything was done, holding an inventory sheet that they found which listed how many desks she had bought for the school, blackboards, etc

and being asked about a few desks they couldn't find. literally that. how come there's 48 desks in the school and not the 50 on the inventory sheet.

of course the answer was that they broke and they threw them out. the inventory sheet was old.

but they didn't believe her, they intimidated her at gunpoint. a little lady, a school principal who probably weighed 100 pounds. where are the fucking desks. she remembered that forever.

it's almost 70 years later, and the situation is if anything only more absurd, more morally and economically bankrupt

in Cuba if your fridge breaks, you wait until the government sends you a new one (on the seventh of never) and docks it from your govt pay accordingly. your govt pay is ~16 USD a month.

you can make more by pestering some euro or canadian tourist to buy some random junk off you -- if you follow them around enough and are persuasive enough, they will give you a $20, which is more then your doctor makes in a month.

which is sort of whatever, because there really are no stores, just ration counters with 5-6 things listed on a blackboard that they'll trade you for tickets.

rice, sugar, salt, cigarettes.

if you don't smoke you trade you trade your cigarette rations for something else. toilet paper.

when your kids get older, they don't move out, there's literally nowhere for them to move to. nothing is built, nothing is for sale, and you have no money anyway. you put up paper walls, pretend not to hear each other.

the thing you smuggle into Cuba when you're visiting family isn't expensive stuff, the most precious items are USB drives with movie rips and video game roms, and $5 tins of Cafe Pilon

'cause Cuba exports any good coffee it makes, and leaves locals to drink stuff so bad that the $5 tin feels truly luxurious.

when I was visiting my great aunt, one of her neighbors came in and made himself a cup of coffee. he didn't know it was fresh from the tin we brought over; it had been transferred over to their usual container.

saw a grown man well up with apologetic tears in his eyes because as soon as his lips touched the drink, he knew this was different. he drank his neighbor's Cafe Pilon thinking it was just the usual crap and he almost cried. Because he felt he had taken something incredibly precious of his neighbor's without asking.

anyway, my point is: you don't really need to try out repossessing people's private property in New York. there's an island 90 miles off Florida where incredibly smart people, I sincerely mean that, have been doing it for three-quarters of a century.

[Alec Keezer @AlecKeezer]

I can’t believe I’m about to say this…

I agree with Brandon Walker

[NFL Memes @NFLMemes]

Falcons fans describing their Sunday after beating the Saints and then having the ‘Raheem Morris fired’ notification hit their phones

[College Football Zone @CollegeFBonX]

The best game from each week of the college football season.

Week 3 - Georgia vs Tennessee

[Brooks Austin @BrooksAustinBA]

If only there was a way to know Ole Miss would donkey kick this Tulane team

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

Remember that Trump was indicted for "pressuring" Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to investigate election integrity in his state, and that this was linked with his impeachment. Kinda looks like Trump was right, and was punished for asking appropriate questions.

[Carol Roth @caroljsroth]

You can write a check to the US Treasury anytime you want. Don’t forget to write “Gift to the United States” in the memo line.

You’re welcome.

[Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” @MrDanielBuck]

This is a wild paragraph from WSJ

$70,000 per family. Just wild.

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

For a sense of scale on this: The US theatrical revenue of all movies last year was just under $9 billion.

The scale of this fraud is so large, it is basically its own industry. If this fraud was a company, it would be one of the 20 largest companies in Minnesota.

[Not the Bee @Not_the_Bee]

Fulton County admits it illegally certified 315,000 ballots in 2020 election
https://t.co/OoIPJkh1cw