Smoothies and scavenger hunts: How the UW nutrition team feeds Husky football

Imagine a car with ostentatious excess: a V-8 engine that announces its presence with a powerful purr, heated seats, a backup camera, cruise control, hands-free parallel parking, stadium-worthy speakers, stylish interior, shiny paint, glamor and speed, and gadgets galore. .

It won’t work without gas.

Without fuel or perhaps an electrical charge it is a marvelous waste of manpower and metal. Its £4,000 in lost opportunities. Its sailboat rusts in a windless room, a kite without a gust.

The car won’t run without fuel.

Same with the football team.

When he arrived in Washington last winter, Kalen DeBoer was full of input for this cause. UW strength and conditioning coach Ron McKeefery credited DeBoer for listening to the players. That was one of the biggest problems with the program, from within the program. This area just wasn’t given as much attention as it is now.

Enter Alison VandenBerghe.

After spending the 2022 season as the director of sports nutrition at Fresno State, VandenBerghe, a registered/licensed nutritionist who earned a bachelor’s degree at North Dakota State and a master’s degree at Oklahoma and interned at Oregon and performance training powerhouse Exos, followed DeBoer in Seattle.

He inherited a team whose mission, McKeeferys said, was to try to shed body fat and really lean and make it so that the movement was efficient.

Which required commitment and creativity.

VandenBerghe, UW’s sophomore director of football performance nutrition, had to organize unique, healthy menus for each team meal, provided by specific vendors. And while UW currently serves its players two meals a day, fall camp is coming up and the Huskies will 80 meals alone in August.

That means 80 individual meals for 100 players per month.

Eight thousand records and no repeats.

“I don’t think they’ve ever had the exact same meal in one year,” VandenBerghe said. They might have a couple of duplicates, but I always add something unique. So even if they eat pasta once a week, because they need carbs especially at fall camp, we might add a different sauce or a different protein, or I might sneak some spinach into the sauce. So they never know what will happen to them.

But they are better equipped.

This month, VandenBerghe hosted a scavenger hunt at U Village QFC where players could find healthy items without breaking the bank. Because players’ lives inevitably extend beyond Husky Stadium, providing meals is not enough.

That’s where cooking classes come into play. That’s where the cooking demos come into play, said VandenBerghe, who offers both year-round. We took a knife skills course. What is a bread knife used for? What is a butter knife? How do you use a chef’s knife instead of a paring knife? How do you cut different fruits and vegetables and steaks and meats?

And how do you cram healthy lifestyles into a student-athlete’s schedule? VandenBerghe designs his cooking classes to answer these questions.

What do they have in their dorms or apartments? Often it’s just a microwave, an oven, maybe a stove, he explained. So we use a lot of microwavable rice, so they don’t have to buy a rice cooker or cook rice for an hour. What can they use with rice or chicken and some kind of vegetable? We made roast last year with different types of meat. We fried steak and salmon. We baked chicken in the oven. So we will learn different methods and how we could do it in 20 minutes.

In fact, work requires a delicate combination of time management and nutrition.

That’s why the smoothie system.

Over the years, adapting to different operations and being at four or five different universities, I’ve mastered the process, and the process works, said VandenBerghe, who uses a four-blender assembly line to mass-produce post-workout smoothies. So I get my intern to arrive at a certain time and [we tell them that] These juices and liquids were used. These are the fresh and frozen fruits that were used. This is how to make a smoothie so that the Blender doesn’t burn, so we have them over time.

We have 15 different blender cups that we spread out and when we only blended four at a time, maybe we made the next blender. Those who mixed at the same time poured more into something else.

The result is about 100 smoothies a day, all of which have the same nutritional value as the rotating nutritional supplement. During cold games and practices, VandenBerghe and Co. also offer hot chocolate (for carbs) and chicken broth (for electrolytes).

Purple Reign smoothie

6 ounces of milk

2 ounces of cherry juice

2 tablespoons of avocado

1/4 cup Greek yogurt

1 scoop of vanilla protein powder

1/3 cup frozen blueberries

1/4 cup frozen pineapple

2 teaspoons of honey

Nutrition Facts: 342 calories, 24 grams protein, 49 grams carbs, 7 grams fat

But the supply doesn’t end there. The Huskies have their own boxes of daily vitamins and supplements, including two team-wide requirements (vitamin D and Omega-3 fish oil pills, the latter to reduce inflammation and aid recovery) and others tailored to player needs. VandenBerghe tracks daily meal and vitamin intake and sends weekly progress reports to the coaching staff. Players track their daily calorie/carb/protein intake in the nutrition app Notemeal.

UW commit Carson Bruener said he and VandenBerghe had several 1-on-1 meetings last season. Because I was light after last season. I had to gain weight properly. So I thought, ‘OK, what should I really focus on eating? Carbohydrates? Proteins? How many vegetables should I eat? How should I portion my plate? Because when I got to college I wasn’t good at it. I had to gain all this weight quickly, and it wasn’t a lot of weight in the end. So I was able to lose a little weight and fit my body better and the way I want it to be.

Added sophomore wide receiver JaLynn Polk: Last year [in 2021] we didn’t really have a nutritionist to help us stay on track with smoothies and meals. We focused on weight, but it wasn’t as big a deal as it is now. So getting him here is really important. He has been able to teach people how to cook, how to stay on your nutrition plan, what to put in your body.

UW, meanwhile, went 11-2 in VandenBerghes’ debut, outscoring opponents 121-78 in the fourth quarter alone. With the right fuel, the Huskies flourished. And the Dawgs double up.

UW’s nutrition department has grown to seven this year with VandenBerghe, a full-time nutrition fellow (who monitors players’ meals and vitamins and meets with position and strength coaches), two gas station managers (who oversee bulk food/beverage orders) and three volunteers (who take orders, help with smoothies and snacks ).

The Huskies are even considering adding blenders.

After all, a College Football Playoff contender, like a car, needs gas to go.

He’s done a great job growing the department from scratch, McKeefery said. I always tell our athletes that you spell love, PERIOD. What you love, you spend your time on.

He spends a lot of time showing them that he cares by watching what they eat and giving them feedback or creating these meal plans or creating learning opportunities or challenging them in different ways. He’s doing a great job of setting the standard there.