Wappel worked 41 years for Missouri as athletic trainer before retiring in 1996, the longest tenure of any MU athletic staff member. While at Mizzou, he mentored a host of students and assistant trainers who went on to long careers in athletic training at the high school, college and professional athletic levels and in the private physical therapy industry. He worked under eight football coaches and missed only three of 450 games in all those years. A charter member of the Missouri Sports Medicine Hall of Fame in 1984, Wappel was elected to the National Trainers Association Hall of Fame two years later. In 1997, he was honored at the All-American Football Foundation’s Banquet of Champions in Las Vegas, Nevada. Wappel won the Don Faurot Award as the Columbia “Sportsperson-of-the-Year” in 1995. He was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 1994.
