Sonia Martínez González (Santander, 2003) is one of those lucky people who have already found her vocation and are not willing to give it up. In the case of this 19-year-old girl, it is badminton, a sport in which she currently occupies sixth place in the absolute ranking of Spain in the female individual category. It cannot be said that she was born with the racket in her hand, but almost. She started playing at the Quirós School following in the footsteps of her older sister under the motivation that she “was not going to be less”. Thus, at the age of five, “I started with the racket and the shuttlecock and… until now”, she says.
After school, he started at the Torrelavega Municipal Sports School until he was old enough to join the club. At that time he became part of Badminton Olimpia in the same municipality. He still kept this sport as a leisure activity in which he “trained two or three days a week, one or two hours each day.”
It was with the beginning of the competitions when leisure changed to a more serious matter that involved training four days with the Torrelavega team. This effort paid off because Sonia Martínez was already winning all the tournaments in Cantabria. “In the Asturias area and a bit in the Basque Country, too,” she admits.
For the first time, she considered her future in this sport: “It is still true that I am good”. And with that thought came the national tournaments. The first championship of these characteristics was in Jaén and she reached the quarterfinals, a result that finished establishing her decision. “I told myself: now, I’m going to bet on it,” she recalls.
His biggest bet to date was made the following year, exchanging Fresnedo de Rudagüera (Cantabria) for the capital when he was 14 years old. While walking through the Juan Carlos I park, next to his current training ground, in the company of the characteristic winter cold of Madrid, very different from the humidity of Cantabria, Sonia Martínez recounts that “above all my mother was the first to support him and It was thanks to her that I came. My father was fine with it too. In the end they knew it was my dream and they also bet on me”.
“I came and that’s it,” he adds with a shrug. But that is not to say that the adaptation was easy. “Both they and I had a very bad time because at the age of 14 I was leaving home… I wasn’t sure, because being without my parents was hard, nor were they, who would say what my daughter is doing now,” recalls the player.
It is difficult to find something that Sonia was not willing to do to continue playing badminton. Since she arrived in Madrid, she has trained five days a week, six if she does not compete that Saturday, although she usually does almost all of them because on the one hand she plays with the Ciudad de Villalba team from Madrid and on the other hand she is on loan to the Granada team. Torres Group. To this we must add her travel times and her studies as a Senior Technician in Physical Activities and Sports Animation with the corresponding classes. “There are times, like exam time, when it’s very difficult because you can’t miss training. It is an obligation. So you have to manage time very well, ”she admits. “Above all, I live alone, I have to do more things, but whoever wants something costs them,” she says.
The truth is that when he talks about the move or the effort to combine badminton with education, he doesn’t do it as if it were a sacrifice. It is a situation that he seems to accept with pleasure because his gaze is focused solely and exclusively on continuing to play. As far as sport is concerned, his career is just as unstoppable as that of a midfielder flying over the net.
My ultimate goal was not to play badminton just because I like it, it was to become someone in this sport.
Together with Granada, they are immersed in the Liga División de Honor, the highest national category, and they are third in group B. He admits that, although it is “hard” for training to become an “obligation”, it is nothing when compared with the delight that comes afterwards: “When you win it is very satisfying because we are a young team. It has its rewards”, explains Sonia.
He did notice a change, however, in the benefits of sport at a mental level and that when reaching higher levels of demand they tend to be diluted. “There are always eyes on you. You have that pressure that ‘So-and-so’ is watching me and in the end mental health influences a lot, especially in games. There are decisive matches in which we often don’t know how to manage them due to the pressure, and that makes us end badly. The same a week later we are still bad, ”says the athlete.
He has also developed his techniques for this inconvenience together with his sports psychologist. “When it comes to competing I always wear a green bracelet, it contains a series of values such as ‘trust’ or ‘respect’, and every time I’m in a bad moment I look at my bracelet and I know that I have to calm down and go back to the established guidelines”, describes Sonia Martínez.
Another thing that helps her when it comes to finding motivation and that seems to her a priority is having references in the world of badminton, and one of the main ones could not be other than Carolina Marín. “I say, Joe, if Carolina is world champion, why not me?” Far from saying it as an arrogant statement, the player explains that “it’s not that I’m going to be, but it’s easier to motivate yourself having someone who has already done it. I think that Carolina in her day would see it as more impossible because she had no reference who had done it at the Spanish level ”.
Among the leading people who motivate her are also those she has met in badminton and with whom she trains at the Centro de Tecnificación in Madrid, as well as her doubles partner. “There are the best of each team, there is a lot of variety and we don’t always train with the same ones.” Sonia considers that it is a characteristic of her that helps her to improve more because it allows her to learn from the rest of her. “Especially from the boys, they are the ones I learn the most because they are the ones who push me the most and tell me things that I have to improve,” she explains.
In the end, he believes that it is a sport in which more or less everyone knows each other wherever they go, partly because it lacks visibility. “Several programs are currently being carried out in schools. It’s very good because they teach them things about badminton and other sports that are in the minority and bring in well-known players,” says the athlete, for whom this type of initiative is essential because “they motivate children and make them want to practice these sports that are not so well known”.
He gives as an example of these new generations two boys from Cantabria who in mixed doubles have won a bronze medal in the Spanish under-11 championship. “I am very happy to know that there is someone who is playing badminton and I hope they continue playing because there are promises, but unfortunately many either leave, leave it, or switch to football,” laments Sonia. She herself belongs to the first group, she is one of those who left the community and today she considers that her current position in the ranking of her being in Cantabria “could not have achieved it”.
At the age when she was betting everything on badminton and deciding that she had to go to Madrid to opt for a professional level is when almost twice as many girls as boys drop out of the sport. Sonia knows “many girls who have left” at those ages, although she stresses that she “has not considered it.” “Yes, it is true that I have thought many times about giving myself some time, but not about giving it up, because my ultimate goal was not to play badminton just because I like it, it was to become someone in this sport”, explains the athlete.
It also considers it an inclusive sport for girls because of the modalities it has: female or male individual, female or male doubles and mixed doubles. “I play mixed doubles, for example, and I like it because I think it helps the women to be included with the boys and the boys to not be ‘so small.’ It makes everything more pineapple, so to speak”, assesses Sonia.
Although if he had to choose, he probably couldn’t choose just one. Beyond her position in the individual modality, she has been third in Spain in mixed doubles. “Not yet in the women’s double, but I hope to be,” she says, laughing. The mixed one seems to be the most difficult category due to the speed of the shots, so even if “if she could always play all three, she would”. “Singles and women’s doubles are the ones I like the most,” she admits.
He does not know the modality that he will practice in the future, although he admits that he often considers the scenarios that his sporting career will bring him. He maintains that he would like to “live in Cantabria when he grows up”, but he is somewhat reticent about the fact that playing badminton in the community “is more difficult when we talk about a high level”. “I will have to find my life to continue at the highest possible level in Cantabria,” he says.
One factor that his community of origin shares with the rest of Spain is that, “unfortunately, you don’t live off badminton.” Very few people can do it”, says Sonia. For this reason, although she wants to continue playing, she is aware that she will have to combine it with a working life. At the moment she wants to be a National Police and even with the difficulty that it would imply to combine it with the oppositions, she wants to “continue at the highest level of badminton whenever she can”. “Until my body allows it,” she says. Even so, the certainty for Sonia is that “indirectly to directly” badminton will always be in her life.
