It’s the deciding game of the U.S. Curling Team Trials final. Team Casper and Team Shuster are tied at three in the sixth end. Casper has hammer with one of their stones sitting at the back of the house adjacent to one of their opponent’s.
The winner of Game 3 moves on to a last chance qualifier to compete for a spot in the 2026 Winter Olympics. The loser goes home. The stakes don’t get much higher than this, and John Shuster is unbeatable in these situations. At least, that's what history tells us. Danny Casper is unperturbed.
He lunges forward to deliver a potential two-point shot. His teammates Ben Richardson and Aidan Oldenburg rapidly sweep the ice, attempting to coerce the stone to curl left. It kisses Shuster’s rock, deflecting it out of the house and gently coming to rest near Casper’s rock.
It’s a deuce for Team Casper and they now lead, 5-3.
As Ben and Aidan pump their fists and shout “Come on!” in excitement, the camera cuts to Danny. He remains stone-faced, poised. The job’s not done. He turns to face the crowd, places his right hand on his left temple and pinches his thumb and index finger together. He pulls his pinched fingers back across his forehead and points toward the fans.
NBC Sports commentator Jason Knapp chuckles and calls attention to Casper’s salute. But it doesn’t quite feel like a salute. It’s like Danny is sending a more specific message.
“Aidan wears a headband so a lot of our family members’ kids started wearing headbands to games,” Danny revealed. “We do that back and forth to each other, and then other fans started doing it, too, and it was like a group celebration. Now there are curlers all around the country at curling clubs wearing headbands.”
Steph Curry broke out the night-night celebration for his famous golden dagger at the 2024 Paris Olympic finals against France. Should they make it to Milan Cortina, you can bet Team Casper unleashes the headband "celly."
Still though, an important question remains: Why does Aidan wear a headband in the first place? It’s a rare accessory to find on the sheet. You might see a curler, like Shuster or Chris Plys, don a hat, but a headband is about as uncommon as an eight-ender (when a team scores eight points in a single end).
Only recently has Aidan adopted the headband. Apparently, he unveiled it at the squad's first event of the season. It was an August contest, Team Casper squared off against fellow Americans Team Dropkin. The game had no bearing on the spiel’s overall results as Team Shuster already claimed victory. To keep things interesting, Oldenburg hatched a plan.
Dropkin lead Mark Fenner had been wearing a headband around the rink over the past few days and members of Team Casper took notice.
“About an hour-and-a-half before the game, I texted the team, and I was like, ‘I'm gonna go pick up these headbands. Is everyone gonna wear one?’ And everyone was like, ‘Yep!’ So all six of us showed up with headbands on. Mark took it like a champ,” Aidan recalled.
“I think Korey Dropkin threw one on as well. I think there were eight of us out of the 11 people on that sheet of ice with the coaches and stuff that had a headband on for that game.”
Although they’re competitors on the ice, the professional curling community in the United States is tight. In fact, many athletes play on a co-ed softball team together during the summer. The headband ploy wasn’t a subtweet, it wasn’t about beef. It was all in good fun. That’s the culture of curling in a nutshell.
“We all love Mark, we just wanted to give him a little shit,” Danny said with a laugh.
The headbands were a one time thing for Team Casper...except Aidan. He continued to wear it periodically for functional purposes, usually as a way to keep his hair out of his face and because it’s a better sweat absorber than a ballcap.
It wasn’t until Dale’s St. Paul Cash Spiel in October that Aidan decided to make it a staple. Jordan Moulton, the coach of Team Casper, told him that her niece and nephew (who are about seven and eight years old) wore a headband to their pee-wee soccer games because they wanted to be like Aidan.
“That was kind of the moment that I was like, I don't have a choice anymore,” the sweeper said. “I gotta wear it. And so I've worn it most games since then.”
Moulton’s niece and nephew began showing up to Team Casper’s spiels in headbands. Danny noticed and communicated that he liked the style choice via an “air headband” motion.
It soon evolved into Danny directing the gesture to Aidan during games for making a good sweep. Geographically, the teammates typically are on opposite ends of the sheet, so a high five isn’t really an option.
“I didn't actively think about it, but it just kind of became a celebration for our team,” Danny asserted. “I think I'm the only one that actually does it on the sheet and then on top of that, fans started doing it.”
Non-family members showed up to the Team Trials wearing their own headbands and engaging with the skip. The rink soon realized, however, that the accessory wasn’t just sweeping the Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but the nation at large.
Two days after Team Casper clinched a berth to the Olympic Qualification Event (OQE), Bay Area Curling posted a photo on Instagram of its Monday night league members wearing orange headbands. The caption shouted out Aidan specifically.
“Everyone loves an underdog,” said Sadie Scheffer, who teaches beginner curling lessons and runs the new member committee at Bay Area Curling. “A lot of people here certainly were rooting for Team Casper at the Trials. I think though it was more like we were rooting for great shot making and great curling. We were here for the drama.”
The club, based in Oakland, California is volunteer run and operates with the mission “to develop recreational and competitive curlers of all ages and abilities, and be a champion for diversity, equity, and inclusion in our sport,” according to its website.
Scheffer shared that they hosted pseudo-watch parties of the Trials final on the club’s Slack. Members provided live updates and reactions to the various shots. There’s a solid chance they’ll set up something similar for the OQE.
When asked if Bay Area’s members made good on their IG-declared “vow” to wear the good luck charms until Team Casper officially qualified for the 2026 Winter Olympics, Scheffer offered:
“The headbands are definitely lying around in random places. I don't know that too many people have worn them every week, but they're still around for sure. Their presence is very much felt.”
For the OQE, which began late last week and continues through this week, Oldenburg debuted a new set of headbands: one is red, the other is white (to match the rink’s jersey colors) and — *new feature alert* — they tie in the back, Karate Kid-style.
He ultimately elected to retire the orange headband he made “famous” at the Team Trials — perhaps a blasphemous decision for those who are superstitious. Aidan claimed he doesn’t fall into that category, but also that he will continue wearing his new sheet attire.
“I'm just gonna stick with it. It's fun, I enjoy it. It's something different.”
Whether he's superstitious, a little "stitious" (to quote John Shuster quoting Michael Scott from The Office) or none of the above, Oldenburg's headband and the celly are here to stay.