It's hard to believe that Santino Quaranta is just 23 years of age. The D.C. United striker has now been in the league for seven years, but as Quaranta tells Soccer365, it certainly hasn't been a glorious seven years. Quaranta says he hit rock bottom when the New York Red Bulls waived him on Jan. 3.
Reflecting on his year in New York Quaranta says, "I don't even know how I made it that far. In the playing sense, I'm just going to be honest with you, I shouldn't even have been out there. My time there was really just all basically like a blur." Toward the end of his time there, Quaranta suffered an injury to his foot. "Doctors told me they didn't think I was going to be able to come back from that and play. That was it, that was the bottom," he says. "I wasn't even in New York the last two months. I was in a boot, not going in to training, and I was just down in Baltimore not doing the right things."
Quaranta repeats that he wasn't doing "the right things" throughout the interview: "I never really did the right things just in life, I couldn't really deal with life in life's terms, you know what I mean?" Faced with the prospect of no job and no further chances to play in MLS, Quaranta says his former D.C. United teammates Jaime Moreno and Ben Olsen landed him a tryout with his former club. "It was basically like a job interview," Quaranta says. "If I didn't show up in shape, if I didn't come with the right mentality, there was no chance they were even going to keep me for a week. Once I stayed, that made me feel good, like a turning point...Then I started actually playing about a week in and from there it's all history and that's kind of where I'm at right now."
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