Aug. 18, 2009
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Archive: 5 things you should know about long snapping
1. It’s four not three meals a day. Training camp is four meals a day and you are feeding between 120-150 per meal. It is around 150 per meal, but it is more like you are cooking for 250 because you are cooking for football players. We have eight people working at a time and some of the staff comes in at 4:30 a.m. before breakfast begins at 6:30. We have lunch at noon, the first dinner at 4 p.m. and the second dinner at 8:45 p.m. Some people will be stuck in the training room and they won’t come in until 9:30 or 10, so it is almost an 18-hour a day operation to take care of everyone.
2. Nothing quite like a Roman Holiday. We use a ton of fruit because when it is hot we have something called a Roman Holiday, where we send good fruit out to the field during break time. We give them fruits such as watermelon and peaches out on the field so they don’t get dehydrated. Tom (Bossung, Vanderbilt head athletic trainer) will let me know and then we will bring the fruit out.
3. And you think you ate a lot. We go through 700-900 eggs a day for breakfast. We have 10-gallon tanks of chocolate, skim and 2% milk, and we have to fill each one up with 10 gallons every day. We go through a case and half of bananas, four cases of strawberries a day. The food item we go though more than anything else are chicken breasts. We will go though 180 pounds of chicken breasts a day. When we have steaks, we go through a pound and a half per person.
4. Players eat smarter than they used to. I think (players) are getting more educated because they eat a lot more fruits than they used to. If I used to get two or three cases of strawberries a day, now I get four cases. It seems like every year they get more educated as far as what they should be eating. Chicken breast is their favorite food and they know it is the right type of protein because it is lean and it is grilled. We give them a lot of chicken because if we don’t have chicken out, they ask for it since they know it is good for them.
5. Team gains weight during camp. The majority of players at other colleges lose weight during camp, but as a whole, our team gains weight during camp. A big reason is because the practice field is so close to the training table. At a lot of colleges, you have to go to the other side of campus, but here all the meals are close to the practice field and we fuel them the whole time. We also have different varieties and selections, so they can always find something they like.
Ryan Schulz / VUcommodores.com
