Big-time dream: Small-town MN friends reunite as Vikings player and scout

Gotta love it, so provincial...

Spicer reunion: Vikings receiver Brandon Zylstra, scout Jake Essler together again in PurpleHometown pals Brandon Zylstra and Jake Essler reunite after winding treks to their home team

Before making the Vikings roster this week, receiver Brandon Zylstra declared to his mother, Marcia, that his peewee football career was just a first step toward playing on Sundays.
“One day he told me, ‘I’m going to be a professional football player someday,’ ” Marcia Zylstra recalled. “I said, ‘Yep, and that’s fine, but you probably should pick something else to do.’ He said, ‘Mom, you shouldn’t say that to me.’ Well look it now.”
Long before his promotion to Vikings scout in June, Jake Essler was in the crowd of kids at training camp in Mankato seeking autographs when his father, Dan, made his own prediction.
“I remember telling Cris Carter one day, ‘Hopefully he’ll be out here,’ ” Dan Essler said. “Cris Carter did the roll your eyes thing, you know, but he’s just there in a different capacity.”
Now Brandon, 25, and Jake, 26, the former New London-Spicer High School schoolmates, are 100 miles east from their small hometown living dreams as up-and-coming members of the Vikings.
The Zylstra and Essler families have long been intertwined through their children and sports. Now support of Brandon and Jake’s achievements has brought a community of roughly 2,600 — not big enough to fill the bleachers at the Vikings’ new Eagan facility — even closer.
http://www.startribune.com/spicer-reunion-vikings-receiver-brandon-zylstra-scout-jake-essler-together-again-in-purple/492457531/