Training day

The brain-scrambling sound of your alarm clock wakes you up. You hustle to your morning class across the frozen tundra and below a sunless sky. Your warmest clothes and unprintable mutterings about your professor comprise the miserable trek.

With all of the distractions, one thing many students don’t typically take into account in the morning is breakfast.

A candy bar on the way to class won’t provide enough fuel to sit through three lectures, let alone give the necessary consumption it takes to go through the men’s basketball workout schedule.

A player’s average day could consist of classes from 8 a.m. to noon, followed by a three-hour practice. Add in a film session, study hours and some work with your strength and conditioning coach, and that candy bar struggles to hold up.

This is why Jeff Watkinson, IU’s strength and conditioning coach, and the Hoosiers have exchanged many team dinners for team breakfasts. In his third year as the basketball team’s fitness expert, Watkinson has a point guard’s feel for the kind of bad nutritional habits college students often adopt.

The Chicago fireball stays on top of his players by trying to instill the right types of behaviors in one of the youngest teams in the nation.

Watkinson commonly struggles to make his players “get up and eat breakfast at 7 a.m. for an 8 o’clock class. They’d rather sleep an extra 30 minutes,” he said.

Now, the team frequently congregates in the morning for some team grub – part team building, part feast.

“It is that important,” Watkinson said. “If we’re going to have good practices, which is the most important thing for this team right now, getting better every day, then we have to do breakfast.”

Two years ago, Watkinson tried to convince former IU guard Earl Calloway of the same philosophy.

At the time, Watkinson was just trying to get Calloway to bulk up, not break Lou Gehrig’s record. The guard’s playing weight was listed at 173 pounds, but Watkinson estimates the guard weighed closer to 150 when he joined the program.

In his junior year, Calloway slacked on his nutrition, not making the right choices and not consuming nearly enough calories to put on any weight with the team’s intense workout schedule.

But during his senior season, the lightning-quick guard began to buy into what Watkinson preached.

Although he played in 29 games both his junior and senior years, Calloway played 248 more minutes his final season, a partial testament to his improved eating.

“Every morning, there would be Earl walking into the gym with a big bowl of oatmeal,” Watkinson said. “It took him time to realize that what we’re telling him, he needs to do.”

Much like his first-year boss at the end of the bench, Watkinson is immersed in a rebuilding project. After “fine tuning” veteran teams, the Hoosiers have eight freshmen this season.

But Watkinson believes the biggest period of development for a basketball player’s body is the summer between their freshman and sophomore years.

The team already has seen some results.

Two players who have improved as much as anyone are freshmen Tom Pritchard and Verdell Jones.

When Pritchard first arrived last summer, the 6-foot-9 forward weighed 270 pounds.
But then Watkinson’s workouts began. Some of them were diverse, as shown in a video during Hoosier Hysteria, but all of them were directed toward improving the team’s conditioning.

Watkinson began to curb the big man’s eating habits.

“I’m a big late night snack guy ... but that all changed in the summer when Coach Wat got on me,” Pritchard said.

The forward began to eat a lot of salads and drink mostly water.

“I had no snacks in my room all summer,” he said.

Now, Pritchard is down to a more manageable 245 pounds.

With Jones, Watkinson faces an opposite challenge. The lanky guard has done everything he can to gain weight, including eating a pizza every night.

“You don’t even want to know,” Jones said. “It’s so much food.”

Jones takes in a Michael Phelps-esque 7,000 calories a day, yet the 6-foot-5 guard only weighs 176 pounds.

The freshman tries to counteract his high metabolism with protein and meal replacement shakes, but the intensity of the team’s practice and workout schedule keeps Jones from gaining much weight.

Watkinson said he tries to do as much as he can day-to-day to help his players improve. But some of it, like a bowl of oatmeal, is on them.

“I’ll take care of the workouts,” Watkinson tells them. “You guys take care of the other stuff.”