Chiefs assistant athletic trainer Julie Frymyer led the star quarterback’s rehab from an ankle injury. His rapid improvement is why Kansas City is going to the Super Bowl
Patrick Mahomes had just limped his way through a last-minute, game-winning drive in the AFC Championship when he gave the credit for his performance to someone that even the biggest Kansas City Chiefs fans had never heard of.The full name of the assistant athletic trainer for the Chiefs is Julie Frymyer. She’s now better known as the person who saved Mahomes’s season.
Frymyer had one of the NFL’s most important jobs last week: She was in charge of putting Mahomes through rehab for his injured ankle and getting the star quarterback ready to play for a spot in the Super Bowl.Hobbling through a nasty sprain that often requires weeks of recovery, Mahomes wasn’t just able to play against the Cincinnati Bengals. He was fantastic. He was clearly gimpy, grimacing through several plays, but he was mobile enough to make several Mahomesian plays, including a crucial run setting up the last-second field goal that sent the Chiefs to the Super Bowl to face the Philadelphia Eagles.Mahomes going out of his way to praise her was the first time most people in Arrowhead Stadium had ever heard the name Julie Frymyer, but the Chiefs knew her value long before the guy with a contract worth nearly half a billion dollars might as well have given her the game ball.“She’s the single-best clinician I have ever been around,” Rick Burkholder, the team’s vice president of sports medicine and performance, said in a video released by the Chiefs in January, before the injury.
The way the Chiefs got Mahomes is simple. They drafted him. The way the Chiefs got Frymyer was serendipitous—and it turns out they owe their Super Bowl opponent for her.
