Meet a Lynx season ticket holder who drives nearly 500 miles round-trip for every home game

R.J. Erickson, a 46-year-old postal worker from Sioux Falls, has been a Minnesota Lynx season ticket holder since 2020 and hasn’t missed a single home game since.

He drives 240 miles from South Dakota to Target Center and back again so he can make it to work the next day. This season alone, he’s put 13,000 miles on his odometer to attend 27 home games, including during the preseason and the finals. In four years, that’s nearly 42,000 miles.

But he said it’s worth it because Lynx games are his therapy and a conduit for creating a closer bond with his sister, Beckie James, of Belle Plaine.

During this week’s playoff series, Erickson went to Game 3, dropped James off at home, went back to work Thursday and then returned to Minneapolis on Friday afternoon for Game 4. He stayed with his sister after the Lynx forced a Game 5 in New York and plans to be back in Minneapolis should the Lynx win a fifth championship to celebrate with fans in a parade downtown.

The siblings attend most games together unless Erickson brings a friend from Sioux Falls to experience the electricity generated by Lynx fans at the arena. He said his postal co-workers can’t understand why he goes to such lengths, but his enthusiasm for the team has proved to be contagious.

“The people in South Dakota that I work with, they just kind of give me funny looks like, ‘You drive all the way for women’s basketball?” he said. “They just are undervalued too much and I love rooting for the underdog or the people that don’t get enough recognition that deserve it.”

Now when Erickson returns to work, people are anxious to hear about the game and want to come along. A single guy with no kids, he said he realizes not everyone can make the long haul. But he offers his extra ticket to newcomers like a Lynx ambassador.

James, 53, said they started going to one Lynx game a year when Erickson would visit at the end of August for her birthday. They’d go to the State Fair and buy some resale courtside tickets.

“This year, we didn’t even go to State Fair. We went to Lynx games,” she said.

Erickson said that instead of visiting once a year on his sister’s birthday, he now goes to the Twin Cities for Lynx games more than 20 times a year.

“Because we get to see this, it really brought us closer together. And it’s just turned into this big thing now,” he said.

They went to their first Lynx game in 2015 to see Maya Moore and because, he said, he could never afford tickets to see Kobe Bryant play the Timberwolves. Their loyalty has remained with the Lynx.

“The Wolves have enough followers, and they’re always packed and screaming. Well, you know what? The Lynx deserve it too,” he said. “The atmosphere is just different. The people that I get to sit around have just been so inclusive. They were like, ‘We want you to be yourself, and you can be as loud as you want. We love it.’

“They just really made me feel like I can be myself and this is like my therapy ... it really is. It’s really made me feel welcome and I don’t know when I’m ever gonna stop coming. They have me addicted.”