Following the game home: Paul Buchheit’s path from UNI to the big leagues

When the Philadelphia Phillies took the field amid the corn in Dyersville for MLB at Field of Dreams this August, Paul Buchheit was coming home in more ways than one.

The Sioux City native and 2006 UNI graduate has spent more than two decades in professional baseball. Today, he serves as the Phillies’ director of medical services and head athletic trainer, overseeing the care of some of the game’s biggest stars. The Field of Dreams matchup against the Minnesota Twins offered a rare chance to do that work back in his home state.

Buchheit’s path to the major leagues began in Iowa. After graduating from Buena Vista University, he earned his master’s degree in athletic training at UNI. An athletic training internship with the Sioux City Explorers helped spark his interest in professional baseball, and internships with the Boston Red Sox organization soon followed. He worked with the Sarasota Red Sox in 2004 and Lowell Spinners in 2005 before becoming the athletic trainer for the Greenville Drive in 2006.

From there, Buchheit steadily worked his way through the Red Sox minor league system, serving at several levels before moving into medical coordinator roles for the organization. In 2016, he joined the Red Sox major league staff as an assistant athletic trainer. Two years later, he was part of Boston’s 2018 World Series championship team.

The Phillies hired Buchheit as head athletic trainer ahead of the 2020 season. His first year brought an unexpected challenge: overseeing the club’s implementation of Major League Baseball’s COVID-19 protocols. Since then, he has become a central figure in Philadelphia’s approach to player health, injury prevention and rehabilitation.

That work often happens far from the spotlight. In 2024, The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighted Buchheit’s role in an organization-wide effort that helped the Phillies keep their starting pitchers unusually healthy through consecutive postseason runs. Pitcher Zack Wheeler pointed to the trust Buchheit has built with players, saying, “He knows my body probably better than I do.”

Buchheit has experienced those postseason runs from both sides of the dugout. After winning a championship with Boston, he helped lead the Phillies’ medical staff during the club’s run to the 2022 World Series. That same year, the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society named Philadelphia’s staff the Major League Athletic Training Staff of the Year, an honor voted on by peers in the profession.

His career has also maintained a connection to the research foundation he developed at UNI. Buchheit’s 2006 graduate thesis examined measures used to assess shoulder function. Nearly two decades later, he remains involved in research aimed at improving injury prevention and performance in professional baseball. He and Phillies colleague Joe Rauch have discussed their upper-extremity research through the Professional Baseball Athletic Trainers Society and in 2026 began hosting episodes of PBATS’ “Research Rundown,” translating current sports medicine research into practical insight for athletic trainers.

His standing within the profession was on display again in July 2026, when Buchheit was selected as one of two athletic trainers for the National League at the MLB All-Star Game in Philadelphia.

One month later, baseball brought him back to Iowa.

The Phillies defeated the Twins, 7-1, at the Field of Dreams site in Dyersville. For Buchheit, it was another major league game in a career filled with them, but in a place much closer to where that career began. Twenty years after earning his master’s degree at UNI, he returned to his home state as one of the professionals entrusted with keeping a major league team on the field.