Yasmeen said she and Zy had begun talking about his wish several months beforehand, and she knew he’d choose something surrounding the Vikings. He’d started playing flag football at age 6 and after a couple of years transitioned to tackle football.<\/p>\n
“He’s just super, super into football,” Yasmeen chuckled. “He loves Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison; they’re his absolute favorites. We’ve been to Vikings games together, and we follow the team everywhere. We’re all huge Vikings fans.<\/p>\n
“When they told him he would be able to get a Wish granted, his first idea was wanting to go to the Super Bowl \u2026 but then was like, ‘How about I be the Vikings coach for a day?’ He was super excited, and we are extremely thankful,” Yasmeen added.<\/p>\n
O’Connell is equally thankful for the opportunity to spend time with young people like Zy, who had been overjoyed to walk into a conference room and find the complete coach’s outfit laid out for him.<\/p>\n
“Everybody did a great job, down to every detail. He was ready to go,” O’Connell commented. “He was ready to walk out there and start calling plays and run the show.”<\/p>\n
Zy stayed by O’Connell’s hip, watching him run plays and offer feedback or pointers to his players. The young fan even got a chance to call a couple of plays for quarterback Sam Darnold, who also leaned into the experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yasmeen said she and Zy had begun talking about his wish several months beforehand, and she knew he’d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2073],"tags":[7,6192,233,259,2529,6383,6384,1025,6385,6,234],"class_list":{"0":"post-10395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-vikings","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-kevin-oconnell","10":"tag-minnesota","11":"tag-minnesota-vikings","12":"tag-minnesotavikings","13":"tag-news-community","14":"tag-news-community-stories","15":"tag-news-index","16":"tag-news-kevin-oconnell","17":"tag-nfl","18":"tag-vikings"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114422663393221688","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}