Some days Leah Thomas is a delivery driver, loading milk, granola and other snacks into a golf cart and dropping the items off at team gyms and locker rooms across campus. On other days, she dons a chef’s hat and leads students through a cooking demo that teaches them practical skills for healthy living. And every day she performs her primary job as Tech’s sports dietitian—a job she’s held for the past 11 years—planning a menu that not only keeps the Institute’s nearly 400 athletes healthy and well fed, but also ready for top-level performance in a wide variety of sports.
“It’s like having to cater a massive special event seven days a week,” Thomas says. “It’s an overwhelming task that takes a great deal of careful consideration and orchestration.”
If that wasn’t enough, on a Thursday morning in mid-October, Thomas found herself charged with managing the chaos created by an NCAA rules change that relaxes regulations on how much food schools can provide their athletes. “Managing the entire process, from ordering and distributing food to overseeing departmental budgets, presents a new learning curve,” Thomas says. “And at this point, there’s only one of me, so I’ve had to enlist the help of student-athletes and even coaching staff members to get things where they need to be.”
Despite the short-term headaches the rule changes have caused, Thomas is happy to take on the extra workload. She sees the NCAA’s relaxed regulations as an opportunity for her program to give Tech’s athletes better nutrition and support.
“Up until now, I could give a kid a Power Bar, but I couldn’t give him a peanut butter sandwich,” Thomas says. “I could give a supplement, but not a meal. As a nutritionist, you want to teach them to eat food, not supplements.”
While the revised rules make it easier to provide better nutrition to GT athletes, Thomas says Tech’s Total Person Program—designed by former athletics director Homer Rice as a comprehensive system for teaching essential life skills to student-athletes—is still figuring out the logistics of offering such expanded services.
The Total Person Program supports Thomas’ personal philosophy of providing student-athletes with a comprehensive set of nutritional tools. “Many students come to college not knowing even the basic pillars of keeping their bodies healthy, such as proper hydration and building balanced meals,” Thomas says.
While the short-term goal is to provide those students with the nutrition they need to perform at their highest level, the Total Person Program aims to provide lifelong skills that students will use years after their playing days are over. To accomplish this, Thomas teaches them other life skills for maintaining a healthy diet—sometimes skills as simple as shopping for groceries.
Thomas also employs some high-tech tools for student-athletes to assess their physical fitness in more accurate terms. One such tool is the Bod Pod, a body fat composition-testing tool, which Thomas can use to adjust diets and give better nutritional guidance.
“Everybody likes a number to see their progress,” Thomas says. “We know that, for a student-athlete, a number of the scale is not a good reflection because they’re so much more muscular than they are fat. By having regular or semi-regular body testing, we have a quick and easy method of testing that physical fitness.”
Thomas recently received a new gift that should help her in her job—a sports nutrition lounge. It’s hoped that the area will be used as a go-to space for students between classes and workouts. Thomas says the lounge is designed to have a snack bar feel and accommodate healthy eating, studying and relaxing. The NCAA rules change was a primary motivation for building the new space.
But the loosened NCAA regulations have also brought complications. While the relaxed meal standards were approved by the NCAA in April, Thomas had already submitted her 2014-15 budget for approval. Allowing unlimited meals for students comes at a significantly higher cost, and Thomas says her department is on pace to eat up its budget well before the end of the academic year.
“I requested more funding and I got more, but at the time there wasn’t any benchmark for how students would take advantage of the additional meals,” she says. Thomas is working on several strategies to close the budgetary gap—including securing some sponsorships—and she’s sure the extra expenses will eventually be covered.
Credit her confidence to the support she receives from the Institute. When some universities are just beginning to integrate sports nutrition into their athletic operations, Tech was one of the first three schools in the country to hire a full-time athletic nutritionist, Thomas says.
“I don’t have to fight for people to listen to me, because sports nutrition has been a part of Georgia Tech Athletics forever,” she says. “It’s simply a part of what we do.”
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