Donna & Ed Kelce ‘Tag Team’ Parenting As They Support Travis & Jason’s Football Games (2024)

Are Donna & Ed Kelce still together?

Donna and Ed Kelce are no longer married. The pair stayed together for nearly 25 years before calling it quits, and they remain on good terms today.

“I don’t hate him. We’re friends to this day. We get along great,” Donna said on her sons’ podcast, perPeople. “We were like a tag team with you two. We got to do all sorts of fun things. When one of you had to go out of town, the other person would help with the other child. It was perfect.”

In their documentaryKelce, Travis and his brother Jason opened up about how they grew up with their parents sleeping in separate bedrooms. “I knew my mom and dad’s situation was different than other parents,” Travis said in the doc. “I would go have sleepovers at other houses and the other parents are staying in the room, and my parents didn’t stay in the same room.”

Ed, for his part, reflected on the decision to continue raising their sons under the same roof. “If we had split as we probably both would have preferred, that would have been a nightmare with the logistics, getting kids where they had to be and providing all the support.”

Who is Donna Kelce?

Donna Kelce is a retired woman from Cleveland, Ohio. Before embracing her role as a full-time NFL mom, she worked in finance. According to her LinkedIn, she earned a Bachelor of Science in communications from Ohio University and started her career as an equity writer at Bank One in 1981, while simultaneously attending classes at Baldwin Wallace University to earn her Master of Business Administration in 1983. She moved up in her career, eventually becoming the vice president at Key Community Development Corporation in 2003. Later, she spent 12 years as the senior vice president at Truist before retiring in 2021.

Donna was always supportive of her sons’ interest in sports. The pair started playing hockey at the age of three and also indicated an interest in football from a young age—but it wasn’t until middle school that Donna let her sons play for safety reasons.

“Nobody ever says, ‘I was the best peewee football player ever.’ And it’s not very well organized. So there’s always suspect to parents and injuries and things like that,” she told theNew York Postin a January 2023 interview. “They’re not really trained coaches, so I made them wait until they were in middle school to play football. They played seventh and eighth grade.”

Their late start didn’t hold them back, as Travis and Jason Kelce always had a competitive streak. “It was always a competition. Who gets to the table first. Who’s got the last chicken wing. Who’s gonna get in the front seat of the car. Who’s gonna take the elevator and get down to the bottom floor first,” she said. “It just always was competition. And they don’t like to lose. They want to win, and that’s just the way they are.”

Donna went on to share how their competitive nature lasted into adulthood. “You hate each other when you’re growing up, but later on in life, you’re best buds, because you’ve gone through everything together, so it’s kinda fun,” she said. “They competed with the best that they had in the city. … It was living right next to them, you know? In the next room. Whether it was—mini-hockey in the basem*nt, whatever, it was always competition.”

Donna told People that she often uses her sons’ podcast as a form of family “group chat”, revealing that the three of them “don’t” have a texting group chat of their own. “I talk to them individually or when we’re all together, which isn’t often.”

“But when we are all together, as we were in Buffalo, you get to laugh and have a good time and joke around and I just sit back and watch because it’s so much fun to watch your kids interact,” says Donna. “And I think that’s true of any parent. It’s just so much fun to watch the love between siblings and I think that’s how they’re relatable. It’s just, it’s a family.”

As to what she does before the big Super Bowl game, “I just send them a text and wish them good luck, hoping that they’re going to leave it all out on the field and hope that they come home with a win. I think that’s enough,” she tells StyleCaster. “I tried to tie it in with whoever they’re playing. I’ll send them a picture of them on a horse if they’re playing against the Broncos or whatever.”

Who is Ed Kelce?

Ed Kelce is a retiree who used to work as a sales rep selling products to steel manufacturers, according to theLos Angeles Times. Like Travis Kelce’s mom, Ed Kelce was brought up in Cleveland, Ohio. He had a major impact on his sons’ love of football, as he’s always been a huge fan of the sport and even wanted to play football in college, according to People.

However, Ed’s dreams of college football were cut short when he decided to try joining the army, following in the footsteps of his military family. “Everybody in my family prior to me was in the service,” Ed said during an episode of his sons’ podcast, “New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce.” “We’re also talking about family [that] lived through World War II, so that’s what everybody did because that was the background.”

Unfortunately, Ed’s application was rejected by the Army due to a pre-existing knee injury. He eventually went on to enlist in the Coast Guard, but this endeavor was also short-lived: during bootcamp, he learned that he had Crohn’s disease. “I enlisted in the Coast Guard and the Crohn’s reared up,” Ed shared. “I’d never had that before, and I was sick. I went through most of the basic training with some severe gastrointestinal issues.” He went on to add, “They don’t need sick people in the service, they need people who are ready to perform.”

Nevertheless, Travis Kelce’s dad went on to have a successful career in the steel industry instead. He even brought his sons along with him from time to time to give them an idea of what he did for work. “I’d take them there—hard hat, safety glasses, boots, the whole nine yards,” he told theLos Angeles Times in a February 2023 interview. “I’d tell them, ‘You can have a job like your mother’s, or you can have a job like mine.'” Clearly, both of them took after their dad’s persistent spirit and decided to chart their own path in the NFL.

When It Was Just a Game: Remembering the First Super Bowl

For more about the Super Bowl, football fans can check out When It Was Just a Game: Remembering the First Super Bowl by Harvey Frommer. The best-selling book delves into the history of the first Super Bowl, which was originally known as the AFL-NFL Championship Game. (The term “Super Bowl” was coined only in its third year.) The debut game, between the winning Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs, was played in front of only 61,946 people atthe Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum—an audience wellbelow the stadium’s capacity. Harvey Frommer, a sports historian and reporter, puts the tale of that momentous game together using oral history, gathered by hundreds of interviews with players, coaches, media and spectators alike.