MANKATO - Seventeen years ago Tuesday, a handful of Minnesota Vikings coaches and players stood outside the Gage Towers on the Minnesota State campus in Mankato and planted a tree.
Two weeks before, as the calendar turned to August 2001, they had lost their teammate Korey Stringer during training camp. The tree would grow in honor of his legacy — just feet from the dorms where he and his Vikings teammates stayed during training camp — accompanied by a plaque that would etch his name into stone for future generations.
"We can plant this tree, and we can plant the plaque, but only God will have that tree grow," head coach Dennis Green said on Aug. 14, 2001. "And I think that symbolizes how we feel about Korey Stringer."
The tree did grow for nearly a decade— until 2013, when the Gage Towers were demolished. The school moved the plaque across the street, and it tried to move the tree to the same location.
The tree survived for two years before the stress of the move finally took its toll.
Luckily, the school had a backup plan, according to Minnesota State grounds supervisor Bruce Leivermann
"It's just something we had in our nursery," Leivermann said, describing a fresh new birch tree. "We just replaced the old one with the new one."
And now there's a new Korey Stringer memorial within eyesight of the very fields where he collapsed seventeen years ago. Consider this: a Minnesota State freshman on campus this fall would only have been an infant when Stringer's death stunned the state.
That's exactly why Stringer's new tree is so important in the eyes of Associate Athletic Director Paul Allan, who worked in the athletic department during that painful summer of 2001.
Future generations must know Stringer's story and his legacy.
"It was gut-wrenching," Allan said, describing it as by far the toughest day the Vikings ever had in 52 years of training camp in Mankato. "Korey Stringer was here his entire NFL career. This is the only place that Korey Stringer ever went to training camp, was here in Mankato. So it's kind of nice to keep his legacy intact."