Friday, Jan. 04, 2008
South grad helps make Packer history
Andy Marso
sportswriter
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ReprintWhen the Green Bay Packers beat the Detroit Lions 34-13 last week at the end of the regular season, they tied the franchise record with their 13th win.
Nate Weir, a 2001 Olathe South graduate, was on the sidelines for the entire historic season as a full-time athletic trainer for the team. Weir was one of the hundreds of Packers employees who played a part in Green Bay’s transition from a .500 squad to a Super Bowl contender this year. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said it wasn’t a small part, either.
“I think they’re invaluable,” Rodgers said of the team’s medical staff. “You’ve got four trainers, and you’ve got really two guys who handle the majority of the 100-plus million dollars worth of athletes. Nate is one of those guys, and I think he does an incredible job.”
This is Weir’s third year with the team and his first as a full-time employee after three “temporary” internships.
He raves about the organization and said he’s glad to have contributed to its renaissance after a brief trip to the NFC basement.
“My first year we were 4-12; then last year we were 8-8,” Weir said. “My joke has been that every year I’ve been here our win total has doubled. So I’ve been saying that hopefully this year we end with 16 wins and three of them come in the playoffs.”
It’s somewhat odd that Weir ended up working a single-minded football town like Green Bay, considering he was better known for his European football prowess at South.
Weir played soccer at South and at his next stop, Central College in Pella, Iowa. He initially planned to study health promotion and conditioning but took an elective class in first aid and sports injury that changed his mind.
The course was taught by Central’s head athletic trainer, John Roslien, who would become Weir’s mentor.
“Prior to that class I thought all athletic trainers did was hand out water and tape ankles,” Weir said. “But once I got a little more knowledge, I realized that there was much more involved with it.”
Weir loved his new major and made a good impression on his instructors. But working in the NFL was still a long shot.
Weir worked with Central’s men’s and women’s basketball teams in the winter and the track team in the spring, but playing soccer in the fall prevented him from getting any football experience.
But the Packers routinely pull interns from the NCAA Division-III ranks, and one day someone in the organization sent Roslien an e-mail asking if he had any good candidates. Roslien got Weir an interview, and Weir impressed the Packers enough to earn a summer internship after his junior year.
“I’m pretty thankful they allowed me to come up here without any football experience and not a lot of clinical experience,” Weir said. “It was just based on my résumé and other activities I had in school.”
Weir threw himself into his work at the Packers’ training camp and absorbed the routines and principles of the organization. After graduating the following year, he was granted another internship, that one for the entire 2005 season.
Green Bay brought him back as an intern again in 2006, but Weir was looking for a permanent position by that point. He even applied to the University of Nebraska as a trainer and a graduate assistant. Late in 2006, though, the Packers started winning on a regular basis, which increased the odds of Weir being promoted to a full-time position within the organization.
“It was kind of one of those things where everything was going great, so they didn’t want to change anything,” Weir said.
Green Bay’s momentum carried over, and 2007 started with almost unprecedented success. Weir was hired permanently in November.
Any thoughts of heading back to college went out the window. Weir had his dream job, one of just more than 100 full-time athletic training positions in the prestigious NFL. To get there, he beat longer odds than many Vegas gamblers.
“The reason I got here was just one little contact,” Weir said. “Then I did well and stuck with it and just really bought into everything we’re doing here.”
Weir is in charge of keeping multimillion dollar athletes healthy and on the field so they can keep their careers going as long as possible. It’s a major responsibility, but Weir said he has earned the trust of many of his charges.
“Once you do one good thing for a guy — you tape him correctly or you stretch him the way he likes it — that whole trust factor goes up,” Weir said.
For many of those players, Weir isn’t only an athletic trainer, he’s a friend. In fact, Rodgers calls Weir, “probably my best friend in Green Bay.”
That’s no surprise, given that Weir often spends up to 12 hours a day with the players during the season. Although he has only a fraction of their wealth or fame, Weir said nearly every player he’s met treats him like an equal. When the Packers visited Kansas City to play the Chiefs this year, Rodgers and four offensive linemen — Chad Clifton, Mark Tauscher, Jason Spitz and Tony Moll — all came to Weir’s childhood home for dinner.
Rodgers wasn’t about to get left out of that visit, even if he had to make a few extra phone calls.
“He forgot to pick me up on the first go-round when they went to his house,” Rodgers said. “His dad had to come back and get me, so I’ve been giving him a hard time about it since then. It was great to be able to meet his family, though. His mom and his grandmother cooked an incredible meal.”
Things are good for Weir and his Packers family. They’re cruising into the playoffs with a good shot at the Super Bowl in the wide-open NFC. Legendary quarterback Brett Favre is enjoying possibly his best season ever at age 38 and, when he missed time with a thumb injury, Rodgers looked like a promising heir to the starting position.
The speculation every year is that this season will be Favre’s last and, now that Weir has his permanent position, he’s almost assured of witnessing NFL history when Favre takes his final snap.
“Last year when we played Minnesota at home in the last game, I thought that was going to be it,” Weir said. “So I kept my Gatorade bottle and my towel, and I still have it at home because I was thinking, ‘All right, this is something I want to keep.’ “
It’s a pretty good time to be a Packer, whether you’re a lifelong football player from Mississippi like Favre or a former soccer player from Olathe like Weir.