DULUTH — One of the new owners of Duluth FC, a high-achieving team that plays in the semipro National Premier Soccer League, is an athlete better known as the gold medal-winning skip for Team USA Curling.
John Shuster is, admittedly, relatively new to soccer. He didn't play and he didn't watch much of the sport while growing up. He didn't even know Duluth had a team until 2019 when a friend put a call out looking for host families for the unpaid college-aged players. John and Sara Shuster eyed their finished, but largely unused, basement and took in three.
"It was an amazing summer," John Shuster said. "Those kids were like brothers to our kids. They did a lot of kicking the ball around in the yard."
Now Shuster and Alex Giuliani, a Duluth developer who helped build youth soccer in this city, own the team. They bought the BlueGreens from the team's founder Tim Sas, a priest at Duluth's Twelve Holy Apostles Church who transferred to St. Mary's Greek Orthodox Church in Minneapolis last year. Sas wouldn't disclose the purchase price.
"I did not become a millionaire," he said.
There were four groups interested in buying the team but it was important to Sas that the BlueGreens remain based in Duluth. Giuliani, who is behind Clyde Iron Works and Pier B, has been interested in ownership since the team's beginning, Sas said, and Shuster, in his short time with Duluth FC, has quickly taken on the role of ambassador.
Plus, Sas liked the duos' continued vision of making the players more visible as role models.
"It isn't just there for entertainment purposes," Shuster said of the team. "It's something that will help grow the love of soccer and the level of soccer — something that is giving back to the community."