How did you start your career in sports nutrition?
I started in the field in 2011 when I was an undergraduate student at Arizona State University. My professors were probably upset with me because no matter what kind of patient they gave me a case study, I added that he or she was an athlete. I remember making a strength plan for a pregnant woman, and adding that she was an athlete. I had a 30-year-old man I had to write a nutrition plan for and I said I played in the NFL. So every project I had to do was always related to sports nutrition, and my teachers knew I was very interested in it and wanted to do that in my career.
Fortunately, I was able to take the sports nutrition class my junior year and my professor introduced me to the Association of Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians. From there, I was able to join as a student member, join their conferences, and through networking, learned about a registered dietitian who was hired in the state of Arizona. Bless you because it was like his second day on the job, and I introduced myself and told him that he was very interested in interning. I ended up getting the job and that’s how I started.
Through CPSDA, I was able to be a part of a Gatorade-sponsored sports immersion program, so I interned at Auburn. I always tell my interns to be so valuable that they leave a huge void when their time is up, essentially showing that they are irreplaceable. That’s how I was able to get started because that internship was extended into a spring internship, which became a new graduate assistant position for me, which became the first full-time assistant dietitian position at Auburn. Each led to a new role.
I then went to Texas A&M as a football performance dietitian, and when this position opened up with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, my husband, Casey, and I made the decision that I would pursue my NFL dream. He was very supportive and willing to do whatever we needed to make this happen. Fortunately, his company is great and allows him to work from home, so we’ve been able to do three or four cross-country moves.
Can you explain to me what your schedule is like?
I oversee all of our players’ nutritional needs, whether at the facility or in their own home during the offseason, preseason, or regular season. In the off-season, we implemented about five meals a day between standard meals and snacks. Players are in the building from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. or 10 p.m.
During the regular season, players are in the building between 6 am and 4 pm depending on position group. We’re helping you figure out what your nightly routine is like, whether you have a family or are a single guy trying to figure out life in Tampa. We want to make sure we are helping you make successful decisions when it comes to nutrition. Along the way, we cover everything from when we get on the plane, in-flight meals, hotel meals, stadium catering, post-match meals, in-flight food home and what the morning will be like Next.
There is a lot of preparation that goes into all of this. During the 2020 NFL season, when we went to the Super Bowl, we worked 27 weeks straight. We’re at the facility every day the players are, and that’s literally every day from when our rookies arrive at camp.
Wow, that’s a long time. I want to break down the year a bit. How do you approach the training camp phase when there are nearly twice as many players in the facility as there were in the regular season?
Apart from working individually with 90 players during training camp, there are still all the operational aspects that exist. Therefore, we are trying to establish individualized nutrition and hydration plans to ensure that players get everything they need to be able to perform in practice and on game days.
At the same time, we are in constant communication with the hotels we will be staying at during the regular season, either at our home hotel or in other cities, such as Munich, Germany. It’s a constantly moving target because while you’re meeting with a specific player for a specific need, you also have to think about the big picture of a game week and weeks to come.
A great example of that is when you’re approaching the postseason, you’re trying to look at four or five different cities that we might end up playing in. Then you have to have numerous items gathered ahead of time to send to those road games. Hopefully you get the first seed because it makes life so much easier. But most of the time, we are in communication with various hotels in various cities before it is set in stone.
With the Bucs playing the NFL first game in germanyWhat does it mean to plan a trip of this magnitude?
My first international game was in London in 2019, when the Bucs played the Panthers at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. It was a wild experience. I knew that game was coming when I took the job earlier that year. What I didn’t know was that our advanced items would be shipped at the beginning of training camp, so the things I was trying to plan and prepare for a game in October, I hadn’t seen yet. That was a lot of trusting my own knowledge and instincts and talking to our players.
I am very happy to have that experience under my belt to now be the first home team designated for a match in Germany. It’s so exciting to be a part of that game, and I got to be a part of our scouting trip to be involved in the planning and logistics of where we’re going to stay, practice, play, and how that all breaks down for the team. We began communicating in the summer with the hotel staff about our stay and culinary needs. Again, it’s a constantly moving target, but things were in motion several months in advance.
