Two sets of twins on same girls’ soccer team at high school in Astoria
ASTORIA — Throughout sports history, there have been a fair number of athletes who have had the pleasure of playing a professional sport with one of their siblings.
But only a handful of them have played with a twin.
It took some extensive research, and here’s just a brief list of twin siblings who have also been teammates:
Jose and Ozzie Canseco, Oakland Athletics; Rich and Ron Sutter, Philadelphia Flyers; Shaquem and Shaquill Griffin, Seattle Seahawks; Henrik and Daniel Sedin, Vancouver Canucks; Markieff and Marcus Morris, Phoenix Suns; Coco and Kelly Miller, Atlanta Dream of the WNBA; and finally Jason and Devin McCourty of the New England Patriots, who earlier this year became the first set of twin teammates to play in the Super Bowl.
In the local Catholic high school sports league, there have been cases of twins playing together as teammates. At St. John’s Prep, Astoria, however, two different sets of twins are playing on the school’s girls’ varsity soccer team.
Angelina and Angelica Vasquez and Abigail and Isabelle Fallon are sophomore teammates for the Red Storm. The Vasquez sisters are both forwards, while the Fallons are both defenders.
The team is made up of 22 student-athletes, so to have four of them connected to a twin sibling is extremely rare.
“It’s very unique and no other teams have that, so I feel like we’re very different than other teams,” said Angelica, who played Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) sports with her twin sister at St. Joan of Arc, Jackson Heights.
For these sets of twins, they’ve been teammates with their siblings for their entire lives, no matter what sport. That gives them an advantage when it comes to team chemistry.
“It brings us closer together and gives us a better connection than other people and teams,” said Isabelle, who along with Abigail played CYO soccer and basketball at St. Sebastian, Woodside, while running track at St. Joan of Arc with their triplet brother Jonathan.
Although these four girls are now teammates and friends, that wasn’t always the case. It turns out these twins were CYO rivals on the basketball court when their teams played each other.
“We’ve been rivals since we were really little,” said Angelina, a native of Corona. “We used to be rivals in CYO basketball.”
“Before when we used to play against each other, I used to not like them because they were really good at basketball,” said Isabelle, whose family hails from Maspeth. “But now they’re on my team.”
How quickly that rivalry has translated into a bond as teammates. These girls are also slated to be teammates again this winter on the Red Storm’s girls’ basketball team.
The cliché of a sports team being a family has been used for decades. In this situation, though, it really holds some weight.
“I always preach that a team is a family,” said the team’s head coach, Spiros Kostaras, who’s never coached one set of twins, let alone two sets.
“Now we have siblings that are on the team and even twins. The other girls feed off of them, because they’re all close and it makes the other girls be closer to them. It’s like one big happy family.”
This family atmosphere clearly comes naturally for St. John’s Prep. It certainly does help, though, that four members of the team can actually say they have a family member who is also a teammate.
Contact Jim Mancari via email at jmmanc@gmail.com.