Ready When Varsity Called
One of my clients’ moms recently texted me to say her son had been asked to play tight end for varsity. He's 15.
She attached a video of him from his first varsity game, catching a pass and streaking down the sideline.
I got goosebumps.
Months of lifting, sprinting, camps, lunches, shakes, football practices, and annoying conversations with his nutrition coach had built up to that moment.
Could nutrition make him better at football?
His mom first approached me after seeing the results his cousin got from working with me. I also coach his aunt, so this became something of a family affair.
He was playing wide receiver and wanted to get better at football. His question was simple: Would improving his nutrition help?
Yes. Quite a bit, actually.
He was underfueling, eating too much fast food, coming up short on protein, and getting very little fruit or vegetables. There had also been some experimentation with dehydration, which needed to end.
His body was being asked to grow, lift, sprint, practice, and recover using whatever fuel happened to be available.
This is common among high school athletes. Their training becomes increasingly organized and demanding while their nutrition remains a loose collection of cafeteria food, drive-thru meals, energy drinks, and whatever they can find when they finally realize they’re starving.
He was willing to try something very few people his age choose to do: deliberately work on how he ate.
The lightbulb came on
I had some natural hesitation about asking a high school student to manage his nutrition. Most of them simply just don't care. And that's totally understandable. Did you care about produce and protein at 15?
Teenagers already have school, sports, friends, family, and schedules controlled by adults. Giving one of them another list of responsibilities can go sideways quickly.
He handled it.
He consistently worked through what I asked of him and gave me honest, useful feedback. That feedback allowed us to adjust the plan around his appetite, schedule, training, camps, and food preferences.
Then he started connecting what he ate with how he felt and performed.
That was the lightbulb.
Food stopped being something adults nagged him about. He could feel the difference during lifting, sprinting, and football practice. Hunger, energy, strength, speed, and recovery became information he could use.
Our plan evolved with him. We worked on bringing a real lunch to school, eating roughly four times per day, getting enough protein, adding fruits and vegetables, using shakes when they were useful, taking creatine, drinking enough fluid, and keeping flexible meals within a reasonable structure. We set up a boundary for his fast food consumption this summer and rewarded him with compression leg cuffs for recovery once he showed that he could do it.
Mom was a teammate
We made one rule clear when we agreed to work together: Mom would help, but she wouldn’t do everything.
His mom shopped, prepared food, drove him around, communicated with me, bought supplies, and advocated for him when something wasn’t working. He was expected to participate, learn his way around the kitchen, prepare some of his own food, and gradually build the skills to support himself.
That division matters.
A parent can keep feeding a teenager forever, but eventually that teenager leaves home.
Nutrition coaching should leave a young athlete more capable of looking after himself when they stop focusing on sports and shift into life. For as much as we focus on him being a better athlete, we're also in full agreement that we're setting up something bigger that will serve him after his playing days.
His mom became a teammate in the process. He remained responsible for becoming the athlete. We all work together.
Bigger, stronger, and faster
We saw changes within the first eight weeks.
He gained quality weight and improved his performance in the gym. By June, he was six feet tall and weighed 185.7 pounds.
His 40-yard dash had improved from 5.4 seconds the previous year to 4.8, even as he became bigger and stronger.
No honest coach can tell you how many tenths of a second came from a protein shake.
He was also growing, lifting, sprinting, practicing skills, and receiving football coaching.
Food helped him perform more of that work and recover from it.
He spent the summer attending camps at Iowa, Iowa State, UNI, Wisconsin, and Simpson. Some lasted several days. His schedule changed constantly, so we kept adjusting his meals, shakes, hydration, and flexible-food structure around what the summer demanded.
The more he practiced nutrition, the more obvious its effects became.
Then hell week arrived.
Three hours of football on an empty tank
He was practicing for roughly three hours each day and reported that the players were barely being given water.
On the first day, he went without eating beforehand and felt like shit.
The next few days, he ate a small breakfast and drank a Gatorade. He felt better. Still not great, but better.
His hunger was enormous because his workload was enormous.
Meanwhile, adults were discussing the giant meals the players would receive on Thursdays and Sundays. That didn’t solve the daily problem. A heroic Thursday dinner cannot travel backward in time and fuel Tuesday’s practice.
Athletes need food and fluid near the work being performed.
Hell week gave him immediate feedback. Underfueling was no longer an abstract lesson from a nutrition coach. He experienced what happened when he asked his body to survive three hours of football without giving it enough energy or water.
Those experiences are how a young athlete develops judgment.
Then varsity called
He began this process as a wide receiver trying to improve his performance.
Months of eating, lifting, growing, and practicing helped him add muscular weight while improving his speed. Eventually, the varsity team looked at the athlete he had become and called his number at tight end.
A varsity position comes from the whole athlete: talent, work, skill, size, speed, reliability, coaching, and opportunity.
Nutrition helped him bring more of those qualities to practice.
When I watched him line up, catch the ball, and make a play for his team, I thought about everything that had gone into it—the summer camps, hell week, the food preparation, the skill work, the lifting, and all those conversations he probably would have preferred not to have with me.
It paid off.
He gets to choose a set of compression boots as a reward for his work this summer. He earned them.
Young athletes need nutrition coaching too
Nutrition isn’t only an adult concern.
It affects how young athletes grow, concentrate, train, sleep, recover, and perform. We know too much now to let them blindly repeat all the mistakes many of us made growing up.
High school sports have also become serious business. Teenagers lift year-round, attend camps across the country, practice for hours, perform in front of recruiters, and sometimes have opportunities to earn serious NIL money by age 18.
Their lives outside the gym deserve the same attention as the work performed inside it.
That means teaching them how to eat enough, drink enough, prepare basic meals, recognize underfueling, and take sleep seriously. Parents can support the process while the athlete gradually takes ownership of it.
This young man spent the summer building the skills and the body required for the next opportunity.
When varsity called, he was ready.
If you’d like to see how nutrition coaching could work for your young athlete—or for you—fill out an application.
