2025 Hall of Fame Feature: Travis Frederick

Travis Frederick still chuckles at the memory of his Wisconsin football coaches questioning the wisdom of his academic intentions.

Frederick was not only the first early enrollee of the Bret Bielema coaching tenure in 2009 – meaning he graduated from Walworth Big Foot High School a semester before the rest of his senior class in order to enroll at UW and begin his college football career – he came to the Badgers with grandiose plans of pursuing a double-major in computer science and computer engineering.

“It’s so uncommon,” Bielema said of Frederick’s course load of choice, “it’s ridiculous.”

That was made even more challenging by the fact Frederick wound up being the first true freshman in Wisconsin history to start a season-opening game playing center, which demands a particularly high football IQ.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Frederick said, repeating a line he said he heard more than once from Bielema and Bob Bostad, the UW offensive line coach. “Are you sure you want to take on this type of academic course-load? My answer was yes.”

Why?

“I knew that someday football would end and there would be something else in my future and I wanted to be prepared for that,” Frederick said.

Someday turned out to be March 23, 2020 when Frederick announced his retirement after seven decorated NFL seasons with the Dallas Cowboys, who chose him in the first round of the 2013 draft with the 31st pick overall.

Frederick was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre’ Syndrome, a rare, rapid-onset muscle weakness caused by the immune system damaging the peripheral nervous system.

This is the same Frederick who was named one of five team captains and signed a six-year, $56.4 million contract with the Cowboys, making him the highest-paid center in the NFL at the start of the 2016 season.

Frederick said his health issues didn’t result in regret. They just forced him to look for another path forward.

“They really helped to open my eyes more than anything else,” he said. “At the end of the day, it wasn’t the reason I decided to retire; it wasn’t that I couldn’t necessarily play or anything like that. I wasn’t medically forced to retire or anything like that.

“I spent a year with my family and thinking about what life might look like without football, wrapping my mind around the fact that I might not be able to play again.

“I also spent months with a newborn daughter, but I couldn’t carry her up and down stairs and put her in her crib and I couldn’t get down on the floor and play with my son and I couldn’t keep up with them running at the playground.

“When you regain those abilities back, you say, ‘Is football really that important?’ “Is spending time away from my family, traveling all over the country, really that important or is my family – caring for them and being with them – the key to my life?’ The latter just became very apparent to me.”

As a result, Frederick feels strongly that he maximized his time at Wisconsin even though he left with a relatively small to-do list.

“Would I have left early? Could I have stayed another year and spent more time with my teammates and coaches? That certainly is something worth thinking about,” he said.

“I double-majored, but I was six credits short of that second degree. Could I have squeezed an extra degree out of there and learned a little bit more why’ll I was there? There are little things there.

“But ultimately, you learned playing football meant that every play could be your last, so you have to take advantage of every moment and every rep that you get whether it’s in practice or games or whatever it is. Knowing all that, I feel like I learned so much from our coaches and all the older guys that were on our team, that I was really able to take that when I reached the next level.”

Frederick and tailback James White are more than the latest Wisconsin football players to be enshrined in the UW Athletic Hall of Fame. They are quiet former teammates who wound up exceeding most everyone’s expectations in the NFL.

Frederick was a five-time Pro Bowler and a three-time All-Pro who started and played all 96 career games. White was a fourth-round pick of New England in 2014 who wound up winning three Super Bowl rings.

“They both had a calming presence for true freshmen that was really uncanny,” Bielema said. “Nothing was ever too big – the stage, anything – that they couldn’t handle whatever it was.”

Bielema said Frederick and Frank Ragnow were the two best centers he ever had at the college level. Ragnow starred for Bielema at Arkansas. Bielema said he knew Frederick was special early on in his career.

“He was so incredibly intelligent and aware,” Bielema said. “He was just ahead of things more than anyone else. Once I saw him play, it was like, ‘Wow. Just special.’ The maturity he brought – not just physical maturity, but mental – there was never anything that came at him that was too big.”

What you may not know about Frederick is that he was a huge “Dungeons and Dragons” participant throughout college along with his two brothers and friends back home. That prompted him to help start a company called Demiplane in 2019.

“We take the physical books from games like “Dungeons and Dragons” and other tabletop role-playing games and we convert them into a digital presence,” Frederick, the COO, explained. “We take all the bits and pieces that make up that game and make them digital and then we display them in a very easy-to-read way, easy to search, easy to digest way. We also make playing the games significantly easier and it reduces the amount of time it takes to get started in a game. It’s sort of a niche market, but it’s a way bigger market than people talk about. There are way more people that play these games than generally talk out-loud about it.”

In June of 2024, Demiplane was acquired by the virtual table-top company Roll20. 

“It’s been really fun,” Frederick said. “We’ve been working on it and we’ve grown a lot grown a lot.”

BEST OF THREE

One: Frederick spoke eloquently about the most important lesson he learned playing for the Badgers. “The power of team. Shared sacrifice and shared reward,” he said. “To build a closely-knit team, you have to have some sort of shared sacrifice that’s going to end with a shared reward. Everyone ends up in the same place as a result of it, regardless, whether you’re a starter or you’re a redshirt freshman. When I was at UW, I truly learned to appreciate that everyone has a spot on the team and everyone’s spot is important and when you work together, you can achieve things outside of your normal range of belief.”

Two: The next time you use test results from the NFL combine to judge a player, consider that Frederick ran the second-slowest 40-yard dash time among offensive linemen (5.58 seconds) and posted a below-average total of 21 repetitions in the 225-pound bench press. But the Cowboys not only traded down in the opening round with San Francisco, eight offensive linemen were selected ahead of Frederick. Yet Frederick was named a starter on the first day of Organized Team Activities and was the first rookie in franchise history to start every game at center and was named to the NFL All-Rookie team.

Three: White, who ranks fourth in UW history with 45 rushing touchdowns, was asked what made Frederick a good teammate. “He’s a pretty quiet, a reserved guy like myself,” White said. “He was the ultimate competitor. The ultimate team player. He could play any position on the offensive line. He was good with whatever the coaches needed him to do. He was tough. He was pretty much anything you’d want in a teammate and an offensive lineman.”