The top tier of professional sports has long been a man’s enterprise, a bastion of the macho. Especially the king of the jungle, the National Football League.
But women have made inroads. Maybe not wearing pads and helmets, but to the corporate side and, ever so slowly, to the game crew. The NFL hired line judge Sarah Thomas this spring as its first full-time on-field female official. And the Arizona Cardinals brought Jen Welter aboard this preseason as the first female coach in league history.
One area of the game that crossed the gender line a little sooner was the training room. In 2002, the Pittsburgh Steelers hired Ariko Iso to become the first full-time female athletic trainer in the league. She worked for the team until 2011, when she took on the role of head football athletic trainer at Oregon State University. But a year earlier, a Cocalico graduate who happened to be a woman made headlines for her preseason role with the Washington Redskins.
Day 221 of the LNP Sports 365 project rewinds to the summer of 2001, when Julie Ramsey-Emrhein stepped in to assist the Washington staff during training camp at Dickinson College. She taped ankles. Assessed injuries. Worked with players on their rehab assignments.
“I think you have to get their respect,” Ramsey-Emrhein told the Intelligencer Journal’s Kevin Freeman on her assignment. “Otherwise, it won’t work.”
At the time, Ramsey-Emrhein had been a certified athletic trainer and senior women’s administrator at Dickinson for 16 years, and had worked as Dickinson football’s primary trainer for since the 1993 season. With the NFL players, she simply went about her business as normal, just doing her job. It didn’t take long for the Redskins to see they had a complete pro pitching in.
“Julie is an outstanding athletic trainer,” Lamar “Bubba” Tyer, then the team’s 31-year veteran of a head trainer, told Freeman. “Julie is excellent with her skills and with evaluating injuries. How she treats players is equal to myself and my two full-time trainers.”
The Denver native’s time with the team had actually been in the works for a while. The Redskins had trained at Dickinson in 1993, and that’s when Ramsey-Emrhein first met Tyer. He recognized her talent, and the two kept in touch.
“Bubba had been telling me that I ought to work camp with him some year,” Ramsey-Emrhein told Freeman at the time. “But I was never sure if he was serious. I was all set to do it last season (the Redskins trained at their practice facility in Ashburn, Va.) but I got called to jury duty. I had planned to work the (2001) camp anyway, even if they hadn’t come back to Dickinson. When they came back, it couldn’t have been better.”
Tyer’s camp practice was typically to hire six or seven interns to help him deal with he normal wear and tear on players. The temporary staffers were usually college trainers from all over the country. But to that point, a woman had never been asked to step in.
“It’s a first for me, as the head trainer for the Washington Redskins, to have a woman work with us and we were honored to have Julie,” Tyer told Freeman that August. “She’s an exceptional athletic trainer, man or woman.”
To be fair, while the NFL hadn’t yet crossed the gender line for full-time trainers in 2001, it wasn’t at all unheard of at the college level and for athletics in general. Ramsey-Emrhein was not an anomaly. At that point, more than half the certified trainers in the country were women, so it stood to reason that NFL players, had to have dealt with a female trainer at some point.
“I was treated with total respect,” Ramsey-Emrhein told Freeman at the time. “They were totally professional. They knew that I was there to do a job.”
Tyer, of course, was plenty familiar with the days when the thought of a woman playing a role in camp was laughable. But, he noted, progress happens.
“Ki-Jana Carter has a leg injury and I looked over and there is Julie wrapping his leg up and getting him ready to go like there was nothing to it,” he told Freeman. “Women and athletics have evolved. It’s a lot different now and players accept it.”
Ramsey-Emrhein left Dickinson in 2008 after nearly 22 years, and after 4 1/2 years teaching at California University of Pennsylvania, she returned to Lancaster County. These days, she’s the supervisor of sports medicine and athletic training at WellSpan in Lititz.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
http://lancasteronline.com/sports/local_sports/lnp-sports-cocalico-grad-took-breakthrough-nfl-assignment-in/article_5ff5de7a-3cce-11e5-8f7c-73cbbf5b12d0.html