Virginia Tech nutritionist helps Hokies get proper fuel

BLACKSBURG — A mass of humanity filed through the buffet line for dinner a few hours before a preseason Virginia Tech practice, one football player after another. It was Mexican night, a popular cuisine among the Hokies, so the trays of food didn’t last long.

At the end of the line stood Jennie Schafer, Tech’s director of sports nutrition, keeping a watchful but not overbearing eye on proceedings. She’ll make the rounds throughout the dining area during the meal, checking in to see how players are eating.

It’s not confrontational. It’s supportive. She wants them to enjoy what they eat. In fact, players come up to her to show off their meal. The more color on the plate — created best by adding multiple fruits and vegetables — the better.

“I tweet some of my favorite plates of the night,” Schafer said, keeping a camera phone handy. “They just like the attention. And somehow that has made a world of difference.”

Welcome to the world of sports nutrition. Schafer is one of 45 full-time registered sports dietitians at 39 schools across the country, a growing trend in college athletics, particularly among the football heavyweights.

Virginia Tech started its sports nutrition program in 2002 under Amy Freel, who’s now at Indiana. Her successor, Schafer, first got into the nutrition side of sports as a basketball player at Roanoke College.

“I was this player that wanted to know everything to make myself better,” Schafer said. “And I knew nothing about nutrition. There was nobody that knew anything about nutrition.”

She found someone like-minded in Freel. Schafer earned a B.S. at Tech in human nutrition, foods and exercise in 2009, then served as Freel’s assistant. She took over as director three years ago, put in charge of nutrition for all of Virginia Tech’s 21 sports, helped by assistant Kelly Masteller.

Her goal is to educate, not lecture. She wants to provide information to players who want to maximize their performance by eating healthier foods, making small adjustments to their diets to do so.

“We teach through food, basically,” Schafer said.

That doesn’t mean forcing broccoli down anyone’s throats. Much of her job is finding ways to discourage players from going to places like McDonald’s, finding food they like to eat, coming up with healthy versions of it and giving it to them throughout the day — fueling, as Tech’s nutrition crew calls it.

In training camp, it was busy but relatively easy. Since school wasn’t in session, the players were around the practice facility almost all day, so the nutrition staff coordinated all of the team’s meals.

The breakfast-lunch-dinner paradigm was thrown out the window. With practice every day, players needed energy to get through it. That meant constant eating, four meals (or as the nutrition staff calls them, “training tables”) and various snacks throughout the day that added up to around 4,000 to 5,000 calories and could easily get up to 7,000 for the bigger players. Average men consume 2,500 calories a day.

A buffet breakfast at 7 a.m., always with oatmeal, fresh fruit, scrambled eggs and more, was mandatory. Those who miss it have to do extra running at practice.

The players got a to-go meal at lunch usually catered by an area restaurant. Schafer and her crew add containers of fresh fruit as a healthy side option.

With night practice, a buffet-line dinner began at 4:30. Tech uses Professional Caterers, which can do a variety of themes — Mexican, Italian, Asian and, one of the players’ favorites, steak and potatoes, which usually involves a potato bar. Schafer’s goal is to keep things enjoyable, not preachy.

“This is kind of their relaxation time,” she said, looking at the dining area as players wolfed down their food. “They’re in meetings, thinking and focusing. They’re being yelled at in practice. They’re being pushed hard. And I still want them to have a social time, a relaxing time where they still enjoy the food.”

Each meal has options for players trying find the right balance of foods and for those who are picky eaters: a leaner and heavier protein (chicken or steak, for example), high- and low-carb (mac and cheese or roasted potatoes), light desserts (Rice Krispies treats or cobblers) and plenty of drink options (low-fat milk, chocolate milk, lemonade and water). Tech uses brown rice and whole wheat pasta, so players don’t even realize they’re being fed healthier food.

To spice things up, Schafer adds what she calls “morale boosters” every now and then, like ice cream for the cobbler, actual sirloin steak and bacon — especially, bacon.

“Before my time, bacon wasn’t on the menu a lot,” Schafer said. “I see it’s so important in their lives that I do bacon more often.”

After practice, the players got a to-go meal with recovery Gatorade shakes and side items like fresh-cut fruit (a staple at any training table), nuts, peanut butter or bananas.

During the day, snacks are available in meeting rooms or at the Fueling Station in the football players’ lounge (the recently remodeled Nutrition Oasis is for other sports). Schafer prefers those items be salty, like pretzels, nuts or trail mix. Like every other food Tech provides, it has a purpose. Players can lose as much as 7 or 8 pounds in water weight during a practice, so she wants them to hydrate as much as possible.

The fueling stations deal with a number of arcane NCAA limitations. Schafer said the “fruit-nut-bagel bylaw” limits the freebies Tech can give to its athletes during the day. Schools can hand out bagels, fruit, nuts, energy bars, chocolate milk and, created from all that, smoothies. But until recently, cream cheese spreads and jelly were outlawed.

“It was just silly,” Schafer said. “They realized they were being crazy and now we can do spreads.”

Now that school has started, things become more difficult with the football team. Education becomes more important as players eat the majority of their daily meals on campus, with one nightly meal at Lane Stadium from a menu the nutrition staff creates.

Schafer meets with incoming freshmen to explain good eating habits, emphasizing the need to bookend workouts with fuel before and recovery after. Getting to them early helps.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, this is the culture of this sport,’ ” she said. “ ‘Oh, I’m supposed to eat two fruits and an energy bar,’ because that’s what we’re providing them. So they buy in pretty easy.”

She arranges grocery store tours with players to show the right kinds of foods they should buy. On one of those trips to Food Lion, she and cornerback Kyle Fuller found a Greek yogurt that the senior still eats regularly today.

Schafer tries to fight the misconception that calories are bad, pointing out nutrient-dense, higher-caloric foods and pushing players away from stuff that provides next to no nutritional value, like light cereals and granola bars.

“Guys will eat Rice Krispies,” she said. “I’m like, ‘There’s nothing in there. Do you really feel like you ate something there?’ ”

On-campus dining is another thing to consider. Virginia Tech’s cafeterias are consistently ranked among the country’s best, but there are still plenty of food options to steer clear of.

Schafer gives athletes handouts of what are good high-performance meal options at each dining hall, supplementing it with “meal shockers” that show how many calories are in foods that should be avoided.

“Like how many calories are in a [steak] quesadilla at West End?” Schafer said, the answer to which is approximately 1,300 with 80 grams of fat. “And sometimes when they know it, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t even know that. I’m not eating that again.’ ”

Education is key. Schafer’s office is on the way to the weight room, so it’s hard for players to miss her. The nutrition staff’s Twitter feed (@HokieFuel) is gaining popularity, offering plenty of food suggestions. The Hokies even handed out Male and Female Nutrition Athlete of the Year awards last spring for the first time.

Perhaps the best indication that Schafer’s message is getting through came earlier in training camp. Hollywood’s, a restaurant in Roanoke, did their once-a-year fried chicken meal for the Hokies, one of the football team’s favorites.

Near the end of the meal, the owner approached Schafer to tell her that they ran out of vegetables before chicken, a first in his 10 years of providing meals for the team.

Schafer’s response? “That’s because I’m telling them to eat greens!”

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