A college football coach got the biggest surprise from his littlest fan when his daughter walked into the huddle during practice wearing a t-shirt breaking his wife’s pregnancy news and sending the team wild.
Coach Randall Joyner is in his fifth season as defensive line coach at Ole Miss, in Oxford, Mississippi, with his unit leading the nation in 2024 in both sacks (52) and tackles for loss (120), setting program records.
Due to coach Joyner’s commitments with Ole Miss, when wife Trimiesha found out she was pregnant with their second child, she wanted to draw up a creative play to break the news.
Trimiesha also wanted her husband’s football family to be involved in the surprise, too, as just a month earlier, 18-year-old freshman, Corey Adams, was killed in a Tennessee shooting.
And so she purchased a specially designed t-shirt for daughter, Aniyah, aged two, which read “Big Sister” on the front.
At the Ole Miss practice field, on August 14, Aniyah walked into the middle of a huddle Randall was having with his players, tapping his leg to get his attention while he was locked in with the team.
When he looked down and read the words, he quickly turned his gaze to Trimiesha, and asked with a stunned expression on his face, “Are you serious?”
The excited players then ran to get a look at the t-shirt before bursting into cheers and applause for their coach and his family.
Aniyah then made her way around the rest of the practice field, with other staff including head coach Lane Kiffin giving her a high five to celebrate her baby sibling, who is due April 4, 2026.
Trimiesha said: “The month before we suffered the tragic loss of one of my husband’s players, so when I was thinking of ways to tell him, I wanted to do it with our football family.
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“The only way to do that was at practice, because since football season has started my husband doesn’t get home until after we go to bed every night.
“My heart felt full, to have that joy together as a team again meant so much.”
