Chenzo Funari can now be seen on the sidelines during Minnesota Vikings games. He is the team’s assistant defensive backs coach. However, not long ago, Funari was busy working with rockets. The change of heart was not only drastic for him and his family, but for the Vikings too.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
“I sent in my resume, and they were like, ‘Who is this crazy guy that was working at SpaceX?’” Chenzo Funari told NBC News’ Sam Brock.
Growing up around Cleveland, Chenzo loved playing for his local teams. Several serious knee injuries and a 5’5″ frame limited how far that could go, so he moved into coaching as a student assistant. Then, oddly enough, he turned toward space.
The pull was strong, and he doesn’t hide why.
“I always knew I wanted to work at SpaceX, just ’cause it was kind of the most elite of elite. It’s the NFL of aerospace,” Chenzo said.
His first real step came in the fall of 2015, when he moved to the Southern California desert for an internship with Masten Space Systems, per The Athletic. He spent months working out of a garage left over from World War II amid the blazing heat. That experience set off an impressive run in the industry. He worked at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin for some time before eventually landing at his dream company, SpaceX.
In the latter company, Funari worked on the “Raptor” engine, which is intended for trips to Mars.
Still, football kept calling. Eventually he decided to follow it, and his mother remembers exactly when she heard the news.
“I’ll never forget the day I got the call from him,” his mother, Kim, said. “I’m in the car, and I pick up the phone, and he goes, ‘Mom, I’m quitting my job at SpaceX to pursue football.”
Telling her turned out to be the easy part. She was fully on board.
“Uh, my mom was, like, all for it. You know the phrase, ‘YOLO?’ She’s like, “You only live once.”
However, his father was “skeptical” of his decision, Funari told NBC. But he had made up his mind.
So he started over at the bottom of the coaching ladder. In 2020, he joined Youngstown State as a volunteer, helping the defensive backs. By the 2022 offseason, he had switched to offensive quality control, working with the tight ends.
After stops at Northern Michigan and Connecticut, he came to Minnesota. He arrived in 2024 as a football quantitative methods associate, and the Vikings went 14-3. In 2025, he became a defensive quality control coach, and the team finished 9-8. This season, he is the assistant defensive backs coach, and the Vikings sit at 6-2.
Head coach Kevin O’Connell has a clear view of what Chenzo brings.
“We’re having some conversation. He will have a pause,” he told Brock. “He’s trying to figure out just what layer of his brain he’s going to have to go to, to make it make sense to somebody like me. He’s our genius, and we’re going to use that as a superpower.”
As Brock noted, Funari is always dwarfed by the more athletic players because of his short height. But that never seemed to be a factor. When asked to choose between space and football as his first love, Funari chose the latter.
Chenzo Funari traded launch pads for football fields, and with the Vikings off to a 6-2 start, the leap looks like it is paying off. Armed with degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, Chenzo Funari is not your average assistant coach.