Santa Rosa's Curtin twins land roster spots with Swiss pro soccerteam

A pair of Sonoma County soccer stars, twin sisters Cara and Lauren Curtin, have signed to play professionally in Europe.

This weekend, the Curtins announced they had signed with Football Femminile Lugano, based in Lugano, Switzerland. The Nationalliga A is the highest level women’s soccer competition in the country.

They join Sara Tosti, who like them attended Maria Carrillo High School, as pros in Europe. Tosti, who graduated from Arizona State University in May, plays on a small squad in Sweden.

The Curtins, 24, didn’t play much in high school, instead playing recreational soccer and running track.

But after high school, the sisters wanted to stay in shape, so they played in a co-ed adult indoor soccer league.

There, they caught the eye of Eduardo Carrasco, an assistant under then-Santa Rosa Junior College head coach Emiria Salzman.

Salzman (now Salzman-Dunn) watched them play and was blown away. She convinced them to come play soccer at the JC.

“They had the talent, the instinct,” she said. “I said to my assistant ‘Who the hell are these girls?’?”

After the sisters’ first game, the coach knew they were going to be a good fit.

“When you saw them in a game situation, a competitive moment, you saw something special. It was that moment I realized how special they were,” she said.

In 2012, Cara, had a breakout first season with the Seawolves. She was the team leader in goals with 15 and assists with seven and was second in the California Collegiate Athletic Association in scoring.

She was the California Collegiate Athletic Association’s Newcomer of the Year and a Third Team All-American.

The following year, Lauren, who was sidelined for a year with a leg injury, joined her sister in the All-American ranks as an honorable mention.

The conference’s second-leading scorer, she was also a Newcomer of the Year and made the All-CCAA first team and All-West Region team.

After graduating from SSU, they played off and on with the Sacramento Storm of the Women’s Professional Soccer League until a trip with family to Europe opened a new door.

Family contacts put them in touch with Italian and Swiss soccer coaches and the twins landed a tryout in Lugano, which is in a sliver of southern Switzerland’s Italian-speaking Ticino region on the northern shore of glacial Lake Lugano.

Its Swiss-Mediterranean mix of cultures is closely related to that of Italy’s northern Lombardy region.

The twins are playing in preseason games now and their family is headed over to watch them play this weekend, said their mother, Pam Belluzzo of Santa Rosa.

Salzman-Dunn said she, too, is planning to fly over and see them compete.

“They are tremendously talented athletes. It’s an amazing story,” she said. “They didn’t go the traditional route that high-level soccer players would go, but they’ve had this amazing success.”

You can reach Lori A. Carter at 521-5470 or lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @loriacarter.