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Ardsley Curling Club Phenom Danny Casper Goes For Olympic Gold

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February 11, 2026

By Ed Klajman—

Fighting back tears as he met with the media Tuesday in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy, site of the 2026 Olympic curling events, Danny Casper tried to explain how much it means to him just to be physically capable of curling at all right now, let alone representing Team USA at the Olympic Winter Games. “The last couple years have been a lot of not fun, in comparison to fun, and very challenging and scary,” said the captain—or “skip”—of the American men’s team.

Casper, just 24, was referring to the diagnosis he had a little over a year ago of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), a debilitating illness in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves that put him out of the sport for many months. He needed help from family and friends just to get through each day of regular life. With medication and therapy, he managed to see gradual improvement, to the point where he is able to curl again.

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“There’s definitely a time period where I was just kind of like, ‘forget curling,’” he recounted, “I just got to figure out this other stuff and maybe I’ll watch my friends at the Olympics,” he said, his voice quivering with emotion. “My teammates and friends, and everyone have been super helpful. My perspective has changed a bit. Just playing is all I could ask for, let alone at the highest level. I think that frees me up a bit. I can just play loose, have fun, cause at the end of the day, I’m curling, so that’s pretty much all I could ask for.”

Casper, raised in Briarcliff Manor and educated at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, was introduced to curling when he was barely out of diapers. His parents, Jeff and Karen Casper, would bring him with them to the Ardsley Curling Club in Ardsley-on-Hudson, “initially to save on babysitting,” admits his father. “He became kind of the mascot of the club.”

At age 11, young Danny was finally big enough to move a stone, which weighs about 44 pounds. He became a junior member and often curled with the instructional league, where current club president Amy Costantino remembers him as “passionate about the sport and gracious on the ice.”

Young Danny as a young curler at Ardsley CC (courtesy of Jeff and Karen Casper)

Going into his senior year at Hackley, recalls his father, “We told the college guidance counselor to find a school near a curling rink.” Since the New York metro area is not exactly a hotbed of curling, that meant looking at colleges in the Midwest—like Wisconsin and Minnesota. Danny ended up at the University of Minnesota, where he was able to pursue elite-level curling in the state where American curling is anchored.

In Minnesota, he matured into the world class curler that he is today. He led his team to a silver medal at the 2023 Winter World University Games. Last fall, Team Casper upset the4 2018 Olympic champion John Shuster, ending Team Shuster’s bid for a sixth try as America‘s representative at the Olympics. In December, the team scraped through a last-chance qualifier against seven other countries to snag the last spot in the 10-team Olympic field.

When not competing on a curling rink, Casper works in Minnesota as a business development consultant but remains close to friends and family back in Westchester. “I was back home for the holidays recently, and they put together this whole day, I guess you could say, where everybody showed up, and there’s pictures (of me) and all this stuff. And I was like: ‘I owe you guys. I grew up here. You allowed me to be a part of everything.’ There weren’t really many juniors at my curling club. They let me be around and play and stuff.”

He is especially excited that his parents have come to Italy to watch him compete in person. “They have obviously sacrificed a ton. I think back to the days growing up in New York, I’d go drive up to Toronto a lot when I was younger to play in tournaments up there. We’d drive up there, and then finish the tournament at, like, five o’clock on Sunday night, and I’d sit in the car, and my dad would drive through the night until 4:00 a.m. so I could go to school the next day and get some sleep on the way. Stuff like that, that’s super cool.”

Casper’s position as skip is the most important on any four-person curling team. The skip throws the last rocks on each end, makes all the strategic decisions and is the overall leader of the squad. Casper’s team, which is based out of the USA Curling National Training Center in Chaska, MN. As the youngest and most inexperienced skip in the field, Casper is a long shot to reach the podium, let alone a gold medal, as he must compete against former world and Olympic champions. But he said he is unfazed. He just wants to get out there and see what he can do.

“It’s going to be super fun to be playing people who have been there and done that,” he said. Gracious and easygoing off the ice, Casper takes on a different persona with a curling rock in his hand. Michael Shalhoub, a former Ardsley Curling Club president, searched for an apt description of Danny—ultimately landing on one word: “fearless.”

“If you feel a little bit nervous or whatnot, it’s an honor to be playing in a game that gives you that feeling, a wise man once told me,” said Danny as he prepared for Team Casper’s opening game on Wednesday against Czechia “We’re the young team and haven’t been here before, but that doesn’t change the goal.”

“The goal is always to win, to win the gold. I always kind of have trouble wrapping my head around whenever that’s not the goal, and people are just like: ‘we’re here to win a few games,’ or ‘we’re here to make the playoffs.’ I just don’t get that ever. I don’t care what we’ve done in the past or what other teams have done in the past. Every team here is more than capable of beating the other team. We’re gonna enjoy it, and you know, maybe I might throw a couple of comments out there to Nicholas (Edin – the legendary Swedish champion), like, ‘you better not lose to some kids.’”

–with reporting by Barrett Seaman

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