This article originally appeared in the Food print issue, in stands February 2025. It has not been updated and some information may be out of date.
At the University of Utah, sports are beloved by thousands, but few understand what happens behind the scenes. The Utah athletics department focuses not just on victories and accolades, but on ensuring student-athletes are equipped for a healthy and successful life beyond their athletic careers.
There are 19 different sports at the U, with over 550 student-athletes. The athletic department and the amount of moving parts that go into each sport are overwhelming to say the least. The wellness department has staff that act as the silent architects in designing personalized nutrition plans for each sport and corresponding student-athletes.
Meredith Price, the executive director of sports nutrition for the athletic department, oversees five registered sports dieticians. These dieticians help student-athletes with food nutrition, hydration, supplements, meal plan creation or even plate coaching.
“Nutrient timing and meal timing is really important as well. Sports dietitians provide a combination of medical nutrition therapy with performance dietetics,” Price said.
The athletic department prioritizes the student aspect of student-athletes. Students balance a variety of tasks on a daily basis with that of everyday life, traveling and their classes. Add the challenges of competing as a Division 1 collegiate athlete and things are bound to become that a bit more difficult to navigate. The athletic department’s goal is to help ease that transition.
“We’re here to help student-athletes navigate their nutrition surrounding all that they have to do every single day,” Price said. “We do a lot of education, whether that’s individualized, or with specific teams or coaches, on anything related to nutrition and performance and health.”
One of the many great aspects of the wellness department is that they’re able to step inside the shoes of student-athletes. Why? Because the staff have been former student-athletes themselves. This includes alum Sabine Krautgasser-Tolman, a current dietician, and a former University of Utah Ski Team athlete.
Krautgasser-Tolman, who helped the U win two national championships in 2017 and 2019, says Utah has always been ahead of their time about nutrition.
“Utah was one of the first sports nutrition programs in the nation on a collegiate level and it was ahead of its time,” Krautgasser-Tolman said. “The biggest change that I’ve seen over the years has been having more support for our student-athletes by increasing the number of sports dietitians on staff.”
With nutrition there is no one size fits all situation, especially within each sport. For example some of the sports that Krautgasser-Tolman is responsible for include the swimming and diving team and women’s basketball — two drastically different sports in their own rights.
“Our student-athlete caloric and energy needs can be drastically different from each other based on the sport and position they play. For example, swimmers need to eat a lot to support their intense training and recovery. The biggest challenges with that team is how can we get enough food in you throughout the day?” Krautgasser-Tolman said. “They practice two times a day, mostly horizontal under the water, so it’s more of a focus of how can we feed you enough, versus with women’s basketball for example, we do frequent hydration testing and sweat testing. It forces us to be more specific and nuanced; our job is always interesting.”
Utah athletes are from around the country and even the world. With that comes many different backgrounds of growing up around food. This adds a deeper insight that dieticians need to be aware of.
“At the end of the day, it’s the same principle, how can you eat enough, including the right things at the right time to support your performance,” Krautgasser-Tolman said. “It’s common for people to overcomplicate nutrition. We emphasize the importance of having a variety of foods, eating regularly throughout day, adequate hydration and adequate sleep.“
However, this isn’t to say that nutrition across sports is all the same. As Krautgasser-Tolman mentioned, football is a bit of its own beast — at any point in time they have a roster of over 100 student-athletes. They also have a top of the line training facility, the Spence and Cleone Eccles Football Center, which is utilized by all student-athletes at the U.
Football has an intense physicality that occurs in such a short amount of time. In order to be prepared for that, the program leaves no stone unturned with their own nutrition team.
Kelsey Smith, director of football nutrition, faces a tall task but is always ready to tackle it head on.
“When you have a large team, for example a roster of 100 to 120 athletes, being able to execute nutrition plans in volume is a big thing,” Smith said. “It’s just making sure that everything that we’re doing has the ability to be individualized, but also has to meet the masses.”
Student-athletes are learning and developing skills they need to be functioning adults, and nutritionists like Smith are keys to helping with that success.
“We have had a meal prep cooking class on campus, so we try things that help move them in the direction of the basic college student type diet, moving them towards better performance,” Smith said. “We try to provide them with healthy options, knowing that some of them will take it, some of them won’t. When it comes to things like pregame meal, or food before training, we recommend trying to stick to something that’s tried and true. So you don’t want to try anything on game day that you haven’t already tried in practice.”
Football will always be physically demanding, but nutrition will never have to be equally demanding mentally. With the right changes in behavior, the sky is the limit.
“Nutrition is very approachable. That’s the philosophy that we like to adopt. When a student-athlete walks into our office for the first time, they do not have much of an expectation about what it’s like to work with a dietitian,” Smith said. “They think we’re going to feed them really healthy things for every meal which can be an abrupt change to what they’re used to eating. What we like to do instead is just make small changes with our student-athletes so that it becomes a behavior change over time.”
