There is one topic on which Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari and Connecticut guard Shabazz Napier agree: The NCAA’s rules on feeding players are nuts.
Schools are allowed to provide athletes with one specially prepared training-table meal per day, plus meals surrounding competition, travel and vacation during the season. But partial-scholarship athletes, walk-ons and players who live off campus are often on their own.
That could change Tuesday, when the NCAA Division I Legislative Council considers a proposal that would permit schools to feed athletes pretty much whenever and however they want. The legislation would take effect Aug. 1.
The current rules have made Calipari’s players lose weight, he said. Napier — star of the NCAA-champion Huskies — said he sometimes goes to bed hungry.
At George Washington University, an urban campus with few cafeterias, athletes find that a school-issued meal card for use at area businesses is inadequate, athletic director Patrick Nero said.
“We hear from our students that it runs out mid-semester,” Nero said. That leaves athletes to hit up parents for meal money or make do with NCAA-allowed snacks of fruit, bagels and, yes, nuts.
Nero said the NCAA declined the school’s appeal to establish a cafeteria for athletes. Nationwide, scholarships often fall thousands of dollars short of the actual expense of attending college, NCAA leaders acknowledge.
Why can’t schools give athletes three squares a day? Poorer athletic departments worry that doing so would burden them financially or lead to elaborate meals such as “pheasant under glass,” said Dave Ellis, a registered dietitian who worked for years with teams at Wisconsin and Nebraska.
Nero said the goal is to provide athletes with proper nutrition, not to lure them with lavish spreads.
“No one’s going to get a recruiting advantage over an egg-white omelet,” he said.
Related: Rachel Bachman has details on the News Hub.
