Betsy Fine is going to the Super Bowl. Who is Betsy Fine and why is she off to New Orleans? It’s because she was honored with the trip by the Minnesota Vikings because she is the team’s 2024 Fan of the Year.
As part of the honor as the Minnesota Vikings Fan of the Year, Fine gets two tickets to the Super Bowl in New Orleans. She’ll be there along with 31 other NFL top team fans, and competing for the title of NFL Fan of the Year, which was announced at the NFL Honors Awards in New Orleans on Feb. 6. That award went to Detroit Lions Fan of the Year, Megan Stefanski.
“So if anybody watched Honors last night, when Kevin O’Connell was chosen as Coach of the Year, yes, that was my daughter and I screaming in the theater,” Fine told Vineeta Sawkar on the WCCO Morning News Friday morning.
Betsy has been a public educator for the past 35 years and when she exited Weaver Lake Elementary School at the end of a school day in November, she noticed a large black van parked beside her vehicle.
“When my daughter Abbi submitted the application in the early fall, she didn’t get any sort of notification that the application had been submitted or accepted,” Fine explains. “So she didn’t even know if it actually went through and then just kind of off the cuff, she said, ‘Hey, I nominated you for Fan of the Year.’ I was like, ‘yeah, OK.’ And then that one fateful afternoon when I left Weaver Lake, to the 60 yellow and white and purple balloons and Viktor, the mascot, hugging me in the parking lot.”
Fine and her daughter got to attend NFL Honors of course, including watching all the NFL superstars on the “Red Carpet”. Now they’ll head to the big game between Kansas City and Philadelphia, but they’ll do it wearing purple.
“We are wearing purple, both my daughter and I will wear purple,” Fine says. “I know this is a little bit of a cop-out answer, but we are cheering for a good game, no serious injuries. Excited to really see those absolute superstars of the game live and in person on the field.”
As part of this experience, Fine tells WCCO there’s a clear lesson she can take back to her students.
“One of the things I’m telling my students is, this is what happens when you learn to write a good paragraph,” she says. “It can really get you almost anywhere you want to go.”
Photo credit (Courtesy of Betsy Fine)