The Vikings’ sweet Saturday tradition: Donut Club
The MMQB peeled back the curtain on one of the NFL’s secret clubs this week, but it might be the sweetest thing happening in the league: the Minnesota Vikings have a Saturday morning donut club, complete with an executive board and rules.
It began with a simple gesture in 2008 – quarterback Gus Frerotte, who was in his second stint with the Vikings in what would be the final season of his career, brought some donuts to the training room as a gesture of appreciation for the team’s trainers and equipment staff, and they were gobbled up in no time.
So Frerotte kept doing it.
In the seven years since, a full-blown club has been formed around the tradition. Head trainer Eric Sugarman (really, could he have a better name for this story?) is in charge of picking up the pastries from YoYo Donuts in Minnetonka, a few miles from the VIkings’ facility and is president of the club. Three players are on the executive board: linebacker Chad Greenway, defensive end Everson Griffen and tight end Kyle Rudolph. Each player has a role, with Greenway serving as the sheriff, enforcing the rules, Griffen as the one who gives a great speech each week, and Rudolph in charge of planning and strategy.
The point of the club is team bonding. “It’s for the guys who aren’t injured to be able to support the guys who get mandatory treatment all week,” Sugarman said.
Greenway has been a member of the club since Frerotte brought those first few dozen donuts in back in 2008, and said its popularity has exploded the past three or four years.
There are seven rules to the Donut Club. Among them:
1. Players always buy.
2. Lateness will not be tolerated. Donut Club starts at around 7:50 a.m. on Saturdays. The only person allowed to be late was former Viking Jared Allen, who refused to get to the building so early but always wanted a glazed donut set aside for him. So core members cut him a deal: he could be the “alumni booster” and frequently paid for the goodies, thus buying himself special favor.
This year, Sugarman bought t-shirts for the 20 or so regular members of the club, and now gets requests from the team’s fans who want a shirt too (he tweets out a photo like the one above every week).
It’s worth reading the entire story to see what the rest of the rules are. Frerotte, who lives in Pittsburgh, was pleasantly surprised to know that a club had been formed. “I love that there are rules,” he said. “That’s what makes the game fun. It’s really nice to have a common bond about something stupid like that.”
