Sports dieticians say student-athletes’ attitudes about eating well shift relatively rapidly after athletics programs make nutrition a featured component of sports medicine efforts.

“Most of my challenges are that student-athletes are chronically underfueled because of their eating habits during the day,” said Ingrid Skoog, who has started sports nutrition programs at both the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. “They’re great night eaters; they’re not-so-great day eaters.”

That challenge played a role in Texas A&M’s decision to hire a nutrition expert, says Karl Kapchinski, the school’s assistant director of athletics for athletic training.

“This seems to be a commonplace problem on a lot of campuses — college kids just don’t eat well,” he said. “They eat junk food, they eat fast foods, and they don’t have a lot of knowledge as to how they need to manage their diets. As a result of that, student-athletes are not a lot different in that perspective.”

But it appears that perspective can change in a short time, judging from the experiences of Texas A&M’s nutrition director, Amy Bragg, and sports dieticians at other programs.

“Probably,” Bragg said, “Karl told you we’ll be with football coaches at the hotel on the road, and the catering people will say, ‘We’ve never seen football players like this. We’ve never run out of salad, we’ve never run out of fruit — we’ve never seen this before.’ And that’s gratifying. Hotels host teams all the time. It’s something we’re seeing as a result of four years of effort.

“In four years, we’re seeing better performance in preseason for football and basketball. We’re holding the weight where we want to hold it, we’re preserving muscle and not having as much cramping and heat-related issues as we’ve had in the past. And our strength coaches this year were especially happy that we held on to the off-season gains that we’ve had in football, meaning the muscle weight we added on some of our guys, they did not lose in August.”

Kapchinski said much of that success is attributable to Bragg’s ability to understand and gain the confidence of student-athletes, and ultimately to become the expert they seek on everything from how to eat right to whether to avoid a particular dietary supplement.

“She’s taken a lot of time to go around, particularly in our community, a college town, to see what students are doing and how they’re doing it, and how we need to make adjustments,” he said. “Some things you’re just not going to be able to change, but maybe you can educate (student-athletes) to the fact they’re going to go to this place to eat, and maybe they can make better choices about things they should eat.”

Amy Freel, director of sports nutrition at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, has developed a similar rapport with the student-athletes she serves — to the point that they look to her for advice even after leaving the school.

“I have guys who go pro in football, and they come back — whether they’ve been released from a team or during the off-season — saying, ‘OK, Amy, I really need help with my eating. I need to gain five pounds of muscle mass, or I really need to shed 20 pounds.’ And I know my type of services maybe aren’t (available) on a daily basis in the NFL, so they want to come back and use my resources.

“To me, that’s a huge pat on the back, that they know they need help and they know where to get that help,” Freel said.

Bragg said one key to success is to tap into student-athletes’ competitiveness.

“Our athletes are competitors by nature,” she said. “It’s much more effective to stress with the athletes that improving your nutrition is going to improve performance, over improving your nutrition is going to improve your health — 18-year-olds are not real concerned about health. They are concerned about performance.”

That’s why Bragg created an award program to encourage Texas A&M student-athletes to remain attentive to nutrition during off-season training. The Offseason Warrior program recognizes student-athletes who lead the way in achieving performance goals.

“To say, this guy gained more muscle and trimmed more fat than anybody else on offense — to give him an award and recognize him in that way — reinforces what he does, makes him a leader nutritionally and otherwise, and shows his work ethic,” she said. “It’s getting the athlete to do what’s best for him or her, in a way that fits them most effectively. They’re all competitors.”

Above all, establishing credibility with student-athletes not only produces changes in student-athletes’ attitudes and habits, but it also ensures that student-athletes will be able to benefit from the best information available about eating.

“A lot of people know a lot about nutrition — there’s a lot of trends out there, a lot of fads,” Freel said. “I’m going to go with research-based knowledge, and educate them on that. I’m also going to make things very individualized. One thing doesn’t fit all of my athletes by any means. You have ethnic backgrounds, you have gender differences, differences by position within their sport. I make everything individualized for those people, and I can work with them one-on-one.

“And then, I can use all of my other resources. I can use the strength coach, I can use the athletic trainer, I can use sports psychology, I can use the team physicians, and we can work as a group to accomplish this one individual’s goals.”

— Jack Copeland