For nearly 20 years, John Shuster has been the face of U.S. men’s curling, with his teams qualifying for each of the past five Olympics and delivering historic medals. On Sunday, a new face entered the picture.
Shuster’s bid to reach the 2026 Milan-Cortina Games, which would’ve made him the first curler to appear in six Games, ended with a loss in the U.S. Olympic trials final to a team led by Danny Casper, a 24-year-old former U.S. junior champion, in Sioux Falls, S.D.
Shuster — in the skip role on a team with former Olympic teammates Chris Plys, Matt Hamilton and Colin Hufman — rolled through round-robin play at the weeklong tournament with a perfect 6-0 record. But Casper’s young team, whose only two round-robin losses were to Shuster’s squad, won the first and last games of the best-of-three series over the weekend to take the crown away.
“Obviously, this one’s going to take awhile to get over,” Shuster said on the Peacock broadcast after the loss, “because I thought we did all the right things to prepare to be ready for this. … But credit to Team Casper. They’re an incredible curling team and best of luck to them.”
Team Casper still has work to do to make the Olympics. They will represent the U.S. at next month’s last-chance Olympic qualifier in Kelowna, Canada, where eight teams will vie for the final two spots in the Milan-Cortina field.
Casper — teamed with Luc Violette, Ben Richardson and Aidan Oldenburg — made crucial shots when it mattered most in Sunday’s finale. Up 5-3 in the seventh end, he delivered a stellar double takeout with his last throw, forcing Shuster to take just one point and give up the hammer. Casper’s squad then took two in the eighth to go up 7-4.
Shuster had a difficult double-takeout attempt of his own to close the ninth end that could’ve swung the game, but he couldn’t quite connect. His team settled for another single point, cutting the lead to 7-5 but giving the hammer back to Team Casper for the last end.
In the 10th, Casper, fittingly, knocked Shuster’s first stone out of the house to clinch the victory. The two friends shared a hug afterward.
A CHANGING OF THE GUARD IN AMERICAN CURLING 🚨
As U.S. Olympic Curling Team Trials Champions, Team Casper advances to the Olympic qualification event & eliminates the team of five-time Olympian John Shuster. pic.twitter.com/0dymOyZVe7
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) November 17, 2025
“We were on the wrong side of the half-inch it seemed like kind of the whole game,” Shuster said on the Peacock broadcast after the game, “and when we were, they made us pay for it.”
Casper’s rise to the top of U.S. curling was nearly derailed last year when he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves. He was in so much pain at times that he was left wondering whether he’d be able to curl again.
But his team rallied behind him, finding replacements when he couldn’t curl as he sought treatment. Shuster also invited him to be the alternate on his team that ultimately won the silver medal at the Pan Continental Championships in October.
“(Team Shuster) took me as their alternate to the Pan Continentals, knowing I was dealing with all this stuff. But they still found value in me,” Casper said. “That meant a ton, seeing that from a team that we’ve looked up to for so long.”
In the women’s event at U.S. trials, Tabitha Peterson skipped her team to another victory. She was the winning skip in 2022 and was also on the champion 2018 team. The team of Peterson, Cory Thiesse, Tara Peterson and Taylor Heide-Anderson also must try to qualify for Milan-Cortina via next month’s qualification event.
That tournament in British Columbia features eight teams in the men’s and women’s tournaments. The top three teams from each round-robin session advance to a playoff round. The top two seeds play first, with the winner qualifying for the Olympics. The loser of that game plays the No. 3 seed for the final spot.
It’s been a remarkable, roller coaster run for the 43-year-old Shuster, who is a 10-time U.S. national champion (seven as a skip) and first appeared on a U.S. Olympic curling team as the lead on skip Pete Fenson’s squad in Torino, Italy, in 2006. That team beat Great Britain to win bronze, the first-ever Olympic medal for U.S. curling.
Shuster returned as skip in the 2010 Vancouver Games but made several last-shot errors and was temporarily replaced in the role by Plys. The U.S. finished in last place, then was second-to-last in Sochi in 2014, again with Shuster as skip.
The Olympic struggles led USA Curling to exclude him from their high-performance program, designed to improve their Olympic fortunes, following the Sochi Games. Shuster had the perfect response: He formed his own team, which he led to victory at the 2015 U.S. championships and back into the U.S. curling spotlight.
John Shuster and Matt Hamilton compete during this week’s U.S. Olympic curling trials. (Samantha Laurey / Argus Leader / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)
His team — including Hamilton — again qualified for the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, where they started out 2-4 and looked bound for another finish way down the table before an improbable run to Olympic history. They beat Canada, Switzerland and Great Britain to finish round-robin play 5-4 and qualify for the four-team playoffs. There, they took down Canada again in the semifinals.
That set up a gold-medal showdown with No. 1-ranked Sweden, which had topped the table at 7-2 and crushed the U.S. in their round-robin meeting. With the score tied 5-5 in the eighth end, Shuster — maligned years earlier for his misses in big moments — produced the shot of the tournament, clearing two Swedish stones out of the house to score five points and essentially clinch gold for the United States.
That gold medal and the bronze from 2006 are the only Olympic curling medals for the U.S. across men’s, women’s and mixed doubles.
Shuster made it back again in Beijing in 2022, with the same guys that were with him at Olympic trials this week, once again finishing 5-4 in pool play and making it to the medal rounds. But the Americans lost to Great Britain and Canada to miss the podium.
Does he have another Olympic run in him in 2030?
“I’m not counting me out, necessarily, because I got nothing else to do,” he quipped. “I got no job.”