Vikings Coaches and Training Staff Show Their Support for Loved Ones and Important Causes
This weekend, Vikings players aren’t the only ones representing causes close to their hearts during Minnesota’s game in Las Vegas.
Coaches and the team’s health and performance staff are also wearing custom-painted sneakers as part of the NFL’s annual My Cause My Cleats campaign.
Vikings Head Coach Kevin O’Connell is once again donating to the Jessie Rees Foundation, a cause he became involved with while living in Los Angeles. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, General Manager of the Minnesota Vikings, will wear one shoe to represent the Minnesota Vikings Foundation and STEM education, and the other to promote the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital mental and behavioural health programme.
Vikings Special Teams Coordinator Matt Daniels is honored to tribute the memory of his father, who passed away from complications of pulmonary fibrosis in August 2022.
“As coaches, we’re not the ones on the field and might not get as much of the limelight, but we do play a key part in the football game,” Daniels said. “For the NFL to take this measure and recognize us, allow us to be a part of the cause, I think it says a lot about what we’re trying to do, what ‘The Shield’ is trying to do, to spread that awareness.
“I really appreciate the platform and being able to use this to promote the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation,” Daniels added. “I think it’s something that needs to have more light shed on it, and I appreciate the NFL for allowing us to do it.”
Vikings Head Athletic Trainer Uriah Myrie echoed the importance of using one’s platform for good.
“These are causes and foundations and areas that I don’t know if you could ever spotlight enough,” Myrie went on to say. “There are a lot of people on the sidelines of an NFL game.” There are a lot of people, cameras, and video angles… so it’s just a bigger opportunity to catch more people and draw more attention to those areas that need it and should have it. Having that opportunity is enormous.”
Below, we highlighted four members of the Vikings football staff, their respective causes and what drives their passion.
Chris O’Hara and his wife Cynthia welcomed their first child into the world during Week 1 of the 2020 season.
Besides being a stressful time due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the start of an NFL football season, Lincoln O’Hara spent 10 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit after being born four weeks premature.
Then four months later, O’Hara was relieved of his coaching duties with Jacksonville and hired by the Rams – meaning the family moved cross-country to Los Angeles with an infant.
Lincoln’s birth had offered Cynthia respite from hyperemesis gravidarum, a rare condition in which women suffer extreme morning sickness all throughout their pregnancy. But in the days, weeks and months following her son’s arrival, she was hit devastatingly hard by postpartum depression and anxiety.
“I’ve watched her battle it, having to experience both of those things at the same time,” O’Hara said. “I’ve learned a lot about it – but not enough.”
Chris, Cynthia and Lincoln relocated again in 2022, this time to Minnesota to join Kevin O’Connell’s staff. This past August, during Vikings Training Camp, they welcomed a daughter, Amelia, to the family.
“It made it tough again because I’m gone so much during that time,” O’Hara said. “She was battling, at times, depression; at other times, anxiety. Being ultra-worried about the baby’s health, and her health – and all of that while her body is recovering.”
When it came time to choose a cause for his shoes, O’Hara knew immediately he wanted to represent Postpartum Support International.
“I’ve seen what she’s gone through, and this is a chance to let her know that I see her; I see what she’s battling. I support her. I love her. She’s a true warrior,” he said. “I want to raise awareness that it’s a condition. It’s not her choice to feel that way. It doesn’t make her less of a mother, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her children. She’s an amazing mother to both our children, and she loves them more than anything in this world.
“It’s a condition that she battles – and so do a lot of women,” O’Hara added.
