Chad Morris likes to keep up with his former players, but his interest in Arizona Cardinals center Hjalte Froholdt is as much for amusement as it is about performance.
“I always like to watch his workouts and his updates to that home gym,” said Morris, who was Froholdt’s head coach at Arkansas and now coaches receivers at Texas State. “I see that stuff all the time, and when I hear him talking about carrying rocks, I just kind of laugh and go, ‘Yep, that’s him.’ He’s always had this fun sense of humor.”
The fun could last at least three more seasons. The Cardinals signed Froholdt to a two-year extension on Wednesday — a day after his 28th birthday and on his daughter, Lucia Loloma’s first birthday. The deal could keep Froholdt under contract through 2026.
Given his unusual path to the NFL from Denmark, the multiple stops he has made since arriving at the highest level, and the work he has put in to achieve this payday, it was a moment worth celebrating — in his own way.
“Got some steak last night,” he said. “Just raw steak. Complete liver king action. It was great.”
In case you haven’t noticed, Froholdt has a deep well of personality. Teammates couldn’t help but celebrate with him on Wednesday, and his coach can’t help but smile when thinking about him.
“He’s a different cat,” Jonathan Gannon said. “I don’t want to say meathead, but I kind of connect with that a little bit.
“He’s exactly what you want in a Cardinal and I’m glad to see [GM] Monti [Ossenfort] and his people and himself got that done. Excited for him. He deserves every penny.”
Froholdt wanted to play rugby as a kid growing up in Svendborg, Denmark. His mom grew up in New Zealand and her cousin played for the All Blacks, but the only rugby team in Denmark was 40 minutes away. Football was the next closest thing so he gave it a try.
He played for the Svendborg Admirals before seizing an opportunity to spend his sophomore year as a foreign exchange student-athlete in the U.S. When Froholdt arrived at Warren G. Harding High School in Ohio, he was just as raw as the steak he ate on Tuesday.
“I had a friend who worked for a foreign exchange company and he said, ‘Hey, this kid wants to come to the States,” said WGH coach Steve Arnold, who retired in 2023. “Hjalte is very intelligent. He did his research and he knew Warren Harding was a prominent school for football.
“So I said to my friend, ‘Can you send me some film of him?’ I get the film and he’s playing seven-on-seven football! I’m like, ‘Hey, man, this is big-time high school football we play here. We’re talking about Maurice Clarett, Boom [Dan] Herron, Paul Warfield, Korey Stringer and the Browner brothers. Why don’t you just come over and enjoy the experience of being an exchange student?'”
It didn’t take long for Froholdt to alter Arnold’s perspective.
“Like the second day of two-a-days, I say to one of my assistant coaches and my director of football operations, ‘Who’s this grown man right here? Why is he on the field?’ Come to find out, it was Hjalte. He surprised us with how much he knew and he ended up starting for us at tight end and defensive end. We just started calling him ‘Denmark.'”
Arnold said the offers started pouring in right then from Division I schools. Froholdt went back to Denmark despite Arnold’s pleas to stay. He played a year for the Søllerød Gold Diggers and eventually found his way to IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida for his senior year before signing to play with Arkansas.
Leaving home at age 16 can cause culture shock, but it can also force a kid to grow up fast.
“I think I just came over with an open mind and tried to assimilate to the culture as much as I could,” Froholdt said. “Football kind of helped. It’s just a big old family. I was just the exchange student and they were like, ‘Alright, let’s just take this guy and protect him — take him around and show him around,’ and then it was kind of easy for me to just kind of fall into that brotherhood.”
When Morris arrived at Arkansas, Froholdt wasn’t quite as effusive as he is now, but he had already established himself as an integral piece of the offensive line. In 12 starts as a junior at left guard — and in 389 snaps in pass protection — he did not allow a sack, he allowed just two quarterback hits and he was penalized just twice.
Morris saw more of a go-about-your-business type of player.
“The thing that really stood out to me when I first got there was just his work ethic,” Morris said. “He was a man of few words, but he would be one of the hardest workers that you had and he was just this responsible young man.
“He was dating his wife at the time [Ashley], who was a star softball player at Arkansas. You just knew was going to be where he was supposed to be. You knew he was going to do the right thing and let me tell you, when he spoke, people listened.”
Froholdt played mostly guard his final two seasons with the Razorbacks, but Morris also used him at center at the beginning and end of the 2018 season.
“I thought that the more versatile he could be for us, it was going to make him that much better and more marketable when he continued to move up,” Morris said. “You knew he had the talent to go to the next level. There was no doubt about that and you knew his work ethic would take over from there, so by playing him at multiple positions inside, we felt he’d have more opportunities.”
Froholdt was in Cleveland (2021-2022) while Cardinals coaches Drew Petzing and Israel Woolfork worked there. When he arrived in Arizona, Gannon said the intel from those assistants was that the 2019 Patriots fourth-round pick just needed to play more; to get more reps. Once he did, the staff decided his skill set and intelligence would be best suited at center where Froholdt could call the shots.
Gannon also believes that, given Froholdt’s relative inexperience at the position, he hasn’t yet hit his ceiling.
“The communication right from when we break the huddle starts with him,” Gannon said. “The identification of a lot of things starts with him. [Hjalte] and the quarterback being on the same page of what they’re seeing, what the quarterback sees, what he sees… that’s happening pretty fast.”
While he is willing and able to play guard, Froholdt believes he is best suited to the center position.
“The more outside you go, the more time you’ve got in between initial contact,” he said. “I obviously have quicker contact than a tackle, so there might not be as much pace in it as a tackle. You can kind of feel like ‘one, two, punch.’
“I think it helped me a little bit just to kind of get hands on and kind of wrestle. It’s more of a wrestling match the further inside you get instead of dealing with all this space and length.”
When Froholdt sat down to address his extension with media on Tuesday, he said he had been content to let the process play out in what he described as a back-and-forth between the Cardinals and his agent. Even so, it was clear that the magnitude of the moment and the long journey to arrive here were on his mind.
“It’s been a lot of bumps in the road,” he said. “Sometimes you try to survive in this league and you do everything you can for yourself. Of course for the team, but there’s definitely a little bit [of], ‘I need to just make this roster, how can I make it?’
“I’ve been in that situation multiple times and sometimes I didn’t make it, so at this point, it’s definitely freeing to sit back and think, ‘OK, now I can truly just only focus; not think about anything else but football.’”
Top photo of Hjalte Froholdt via Getty Images
