Jazz center Walker Kessler raising money to thank Primary Children's Hospital

Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Walker Kessler is fundraising for Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital, which helped him as a child.
He invites people to form teams to raise money until Jan. 31 to benefit the hospital.
Kessler emphasizes that every contribution counts, supporting research and patient care.

SALT LAKE CITY — When Utah Jazz center Walker Kessler was 18 months old, he spent nearly a week in Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital. Now he's determined to raise money for the hospital so that other kids can be helped as he was at a time when he was "very, very sick," as his mother puts it.

Kessler and his mom, Andrea, kicked off his fundraising effort with a video and an invitation to join him in benefitting the children's hospital that helped save his life.

He's hoping folks will form teams to raise money between now and Jan. 31, all proceeds to benefit the hospital and those who need its care. In February, Kessler will meet with members of the team that raises the most money.

In the video, his mom said the family came from their native Georgia to Park City to go skiing when he was little. On that vacation, he got sick, so they took him to a nearby urgent care where he was given fluids. But he got sicker, so the family took him to Primary Children's.

"They saved him, to be quite honest with you," she says in the video, recounting six days and nights in the hospital, where she slept on a twin bed near him and watched "The Grinch" about "450 times" to the point that she figured she had it memorized.

The toddler had a virus that it seemed the whole wing at the hospital was being treated for at the time, she said.

With the hospital's care, the very young Walker Kessler slowly got better, but his mom remembers that he didn't walk for weeks, "that's how sick he was."

Says Kessler, who grew — he's 7 feet tall — to be a college All-American and was named to the 2023 NBA All-Rookie First Team while playing for the Utah Jazz: "Every dollar, every cent, everything counts. No amount is too small. And no act of service is too small, either."

Kessler notes many ways that the funds raised can benefit the hospital and the families it serves, from research to buying stuffed animals to hand out to the young patients, which is something the Jazz did his rookie year. Such an effort, he added, "puts a smile on a kid's face. You can't put a price on that."

Joining the fundraiser is easy.

Go to give.primarychildrenshospital.org/walker and click "Join Team."
Create your page and choose your photo.
Share with family and friends.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.