‘She is Maimonides to the Mountaineers…’
May 28, 2014 by Mike Casazza
Hi. It’s me.
I think I’d been gone just long enough to forget that before I left last week I’d typed what serves as the headline here as part of the text for my column that ran in Tuesday’s edition. “She” is Nettie Freshour and Maimonides … well, I don’t want to spoil it, but it makes sense. Trust me. I’m a writer.
Anyhow, Freshour is the sports dietician at WVU and the sports dietician is about to become a big deal, and in many places a bigger deal, when the nation gets around to forking out all-you-can-eat meals to student-athletes at a campus near you.
At WVU, this is obviously getting attention, but where the Mountaineers are going and how they’ll do it is still almost equal parts unspoken and uncertain. Freshour won’t say for sure what’s happening, but she also can’t say for sure because a lot will still happen between now and the culinary commencement. This is clay and there’s a lot of molding left to be done.
I nevertheless like it when brainstorming and woodshopping gets going and the go-getters start talking. You find out useful details — Freshour calls unlimited meals “deregulation of eating,” which is sensational — and get a look at a starting point before reaching the finish line. Freshour, like most of us, believes it can and will be a recruiting ploy, but she and others believe it can become a real problem if not handled responsibly.
“What I’d like to see out of this is instead of saying, ‘Here, your breakfast, lunch and dinner is prepared every day,’ is to use the deregulation as a means to make sure they’re fueled and recovered,” Freshour said. “Most of them have two or three practices and lifts a day, or something like that, so recovery is very important for the next time they’re going to be active, especially if that’s the same day. So you want to make sure they’re fueled for any type of athletic performance and make sure they’re recovered from that performance.”