The Pittsburgh Pirates Have Many Hidden Heroes.
There are the men who play on the field every night, whose jerseys we wear, whose names we chant, whose triumphs we celebrate, whose losses we mourn. They are a special kind of hero – the ones on the baseball cards – they are members of an elite brotherhood just 750 strong who every year captivate our minds and our hearts playing a child’s game on a very grown-up stage. But for every Major League Baseball team that takes the field each night, there is another team working behind the scenes to make sure every game goes off without a hitch – for the players and the fans. They are the Hidden Heroes of baseball – and these are their stories.
For Sports Dietitian Leslie Bonci, Food Provides the Ultimate Performance Edge
There’s a lot of talk about what makes professional athletes so good at what they do. Apparel makers clamor to get them in a piece of their gear, promising it offers them a wicking/cooling/warming/compressing edge over the competition. Equipment companies swear it’s a combination of raw talent and a perfectly engineered bat/glove/mask/cup/grip that makes all of the difference. But Leslie Bonci knows the real secret to an athlete’s success truly lies in what’s on the inside – of their stomachs.
Bonci is one of the pioneers in the field of Sports Nutrition and is the sports dietitian for the Pittsburgh Pirates. It is her job to work with the team conditioning staff, athletic trainers and coaches to shape the nutritional ideology for the team, collaborate with the team chef on menus that balance healthy with tasty and teach the players how best to fuel their bodies for the physical and mental rigors of baseball.
“I want my athletes to have a performance edge,” she said.
Bonci’s work with the Pirates began 15 years ago, at what she calls a fortuitous time for sports nutrition – when Major League Baseball, after taking a tough stance on steroids, targeted other performance enhancing drugs, including “greenies” or amphetamines. This left players who had become dependent on their “energizing” effects at a loss for how to properly prepare for games.
“I’ve got an idea, how about food? How would that be?” she asked sarcastically. “Oh, wow, that’s a novel concept.”
But really, it was.
Making it up as You Go
A Pittsburgh native, Bonci received her undergraduate degree in Biopsychology at Vassar. After graduation, she attended the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
“One of the first courses I took was a nutrition course and I just fell in love with it,” she said. “I thought – here’s a way to help people, here’s a way to really focus on the wellness model versus the illness model.”
After receiving her graduate degree in Nutritional Epidemiology, she did an internship to become a dietitian and then took a job at Wheeling Hospital, where she worked in a Cardiac and Wellness Center. Her employers there were marathoners, “so you had to run with them to meet with them,” she said. That experience, along with working alongside exercise physiologists to treat patients with heart disease coming in for rehab and other patients coming in to take regular exercise classes at the onsite facility sparked in her and her colleagues the idea of “active eating” or eating to help your body perform better.
She began working at Pitt in 1984, but never dropped the idea that food could provide a performance enhancement for athletes. A few years later, she called their Department of Athletics and asked if they needed someone to work with their teams. “They said ‘Okay.’ And then it was like, uh oh, now we really have to figure this out,” she said laughing.
“Now, sports nutrition is hot hot hot. There are a lot of majors in it,” she said. “Then, it was start reading the textbooks. There wasn’t a lot of research because there weren’t that many people looking at it.” There were about five to be precise, she said, including her.
It was a challenge she embraced. She knew the nutrition part, but it was the sport part that she had to work on. “I needed to learn about the energy demands of exercise – but also of each sport on different athletes,” she said, explaining that each sport – and each position in that sport – has its unique demands on an athlete. Understanding those components was the key to unlocking the potential impact food had on success.
It was her work at Pitt that led her in 1992 to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Coach Bill Cower’s strength coach and athletic trainer both worked with Dr. Chris Clark at Penn State – one of the other four people looking into sports nutrition. They wanted someone to work with the team on increased performance through nutrition. A former student of the trainer worked with Bonci at Pitt and recommended her. She consulted with the team for 24 years.
Her first baseball job was with the Pirates and came about due to the success she had and notoriety she gained working with the Steelers. Since then, she has worked with the Reds for a year, the Brewers for two years, the Blue Jays (with whom she still works) for 10 years and counting and the Nationals.
“So I know baseball very well, because I spend a lot of time doing it,” she said.
CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING…
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
