Scott Swanson
For the past two years, opponents have lined up against Sweet Home’s girls soccer team and done a double take. Then another. And another.
That’s what happens when you’re playing a team with – count ’em – three sets of identical twins playing varsity soccer. That’s more than half of the starting line-up.
“I’m a proud man,” said Coach Ramiro Santana. “I don’t know if anybody is ever going to have that. Half my team is twins. You say three names and you get six girls. Kent, Currey and Wickline, and you’re OK.”
This twins thing isn’t new for the Huskies. The Kent sisters, Courtney and Haley, and Katy and Natalie Currey, all seniors, have been playing for four years. But it got complicated for the other sides when they were joined last year by now-sophomores Allison and Ashley Wickline.
“We confuse other teams,” said Allison.
“The ref made us all line up once,” recalled Katie.
“She saw us running up and down the field and she was laughing,” Allison said.
This week’s soccer results will determine how long the twins stay together. As The New Era went to press this week, the Huskies were set to play a Tuesday night, Oct. 29, game at Cottage Grove, the outcome of which will dictate whether the Huskies move on to the state playoffs. Sweet Home (4-4-2) as of Monday, was tied with the Lions (4-3-3) by virtue of a tie and a win over Cottage Grove in the teams’ first meetings.
For Santana, whenever the end comes, it will finish what he said has been an “amazing” experience. The twins, he said, constitute most of the backbone of his team.
“These kids are workaholics,” he said. “Anything you ask them to do, they just look at you and shake their heads and do what they’re supposed to do.”
There’s just one little problem: “The cruel part is trying to remember who is who,” Santana said. “When you get three pairs of twins like that, you have to remember who is who, and they don’t like to be called their sister’s name. They’re all just alike.”
It’s not just the coach. Fellow players, including other twins, use various means of trying to identify them correctly, the twins say.
“They look at my shoes,” Katy said. “They can’t tell us apart half the time.”
“They have to look at our fingernail polish or our earrings or our backpacks,” Allison said.
“Courtney always wears some yellow,” Ashley said.
“I just look at Haley’s shark socks,” Allison said.
One way people deal with the problem is to sort of generalize.
“They call us the Wickies,” Ashley said. “When people refer to us, it’s the Curreys, the Kents and the Wickies.”
Santana said he has a better chance of nailing it with the Kents than with the other twins.
“The only thing that helps me with the Kents is I also coach them in track,” he said. “Now I know which one is which. Somehow I can see their faces and I know who it is. If I get them from the back, I have a little problem. They have the same hair, the same walk, the same roll in their walk.
“The only thing I get mixed up is calling the wrong names on the field. I know who it is, but just use the wrong name. I call Haley Courtney and I call Courtney Haley and I do the same thing with Katy and Natalie and Allison and Ashley.
Pity the opponents.
“The girls from the other teams, they can’t figure out why they see the same faces so many places,” Santana said. “It takes them half the game to figure it out. It’s pretty funny.
“We go to schools and the other girls take pictures because it’s weird. ‘Half your team is right there!’ Yeah, I know.
“All the other coaches now know I have three pairs of twins. It’s a pretty neat thing.”
“I feel like they enjoy it,” Ashley said of the opposing players.
Things are particularly rough with the Curreys, who both play midfielder positions.
“When they switch sides, you don’t know which is which,” Ashley said. “I hesitate – ‘ … Katie!’”
Though all of the seniors have played since kindergarten and the Wicklines started when they were in the third grade, the Curreys are the only ones who said they have played with other twins before arriving at high school. Katy said she and Natalie played on a coed team with a set of boy twins when they were beginning soccer.
“They fought worse than us,” she noted.
The twins say they don’t really experience too much of the “telepathy” twins sometimes are believed to experience, although Natalie said she thinks she communicates “better” with Katy and Courtney said she and Haley will sometimes finish each other’s sentences.
And she recalls one time when both were playing forward positions and both were going for the ball.
“We looked at each other and I knew what she was going to do, so I just stepped back and she went for it.”
Allison, who plays defense while her sister plays on the other end of the field at forward, acknowledged that she often can get the ball to Ashley because she can anticipate what her twin is going to do.
Despite the challenges, Santana said, the twins have been a big part of why he’s enjoyed his job.
“It’s been amazing,” he said. “They’re so nice, respectable, smart kids. It’s a coach’s dream to have kids like that.”