Inside the Casanova Center at the University of Oregon is a black box room. It’s even on all sides, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. You can’t see in from the outside. Its door is hidden, blending in with the side of the box. It’s discrete, and it’s exactly the way Pratik Patel likes his office.
“Sometimes people walk by and don’t even see it,” Patel said. “It’s kind of cool, but at the same time, they know if they ever need me, they can come right in.”
Patel, 29, is the Director of Sports Nutrition at Oregon. His job is to make sure that the 485 student-athletes at the university are eating healthy enough to thrive at optimal performance in their respective sports.
Working in this position wasn’t always in Patel’s future. When he first arrived as a freshman at Kansas State, he was majoring in mechanical engineering. He didn’t have the grade point average he hoped for and his motivation level was low.
After consulting with people close to him, he decided to major in Dietetics. He graduated from Kansas State, interned with the University of Kansas, the Kansas City Royals and the Kansas City Chiefs before returning to Kansas State. As a graduate student, he studied kinesiology so he could combine his knowledge of nutrition and apply it to the world of physical activity.
In 2012, Patel got a job at Michigan State where he could build his own nutrition plan. He had that ability with support from most of the school. After two years, he wanted more. “I wanted to continue to develop my program under my own discretion,” he said.
His superiors were optimistic about the future of sports nutrition at the school, but wanted to hold off on any deviations from the program until the future.
While at Michigan State, Patel was in a casual conversation with his brother-in-law. He was asked, “If you had to pick one school that you could work for, where would it be?”
“Oregon,” Patel said. “It came right off the top of my head.”
Patel called Oregon the “forefront” of the sports nutrition world. “It’s collaborating science and technology for the care of our student-athletes,” Patel said.
Oregon’s had two other full-time directors of sports nutrition. James Harris was the first one. After leaving Oregon, Harris joined Chip Kelly with the Philadelphia Eagles where he is now Chief of Staff for the football team. Adam Korzun took over in 2012 and remained on staff at Oregon before taking the same job with the Green Bay Packers, last July.
While searching on an NCAA job site he saw Oregon was seeking a Director of Sports Nutrition.
“This is something I couldn’t pass up,” he said.
He applied and was asked to interview in Eugene. During his interview, Jeff Hawkins, the school’s Director of Football Operations, was giving Patel a tour of the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex. It was in October, about a month after Oregon beat Michigan State 46-27.
Hawkins took Patel into the coaches room, where Patel had a chance to meet Oregon football head coach Mark Helfrich. When Patel went to shake Helfrich’s hand, the coaches eyes looked down. On Patel’s hand was a Michigan State Rose Bowl ring from the football team’s 24-20 win over Stanford the year before.
Patel was hired.
“So, he’s a traitor to the Spartans,” former Oregon defensive lineman Sam Kamp said jokingly when he found out Patel’s past.
Patel was inserted midway through the Oregon football team’s season. Even though he directs nutrition for every student-athlete, football, at the time, was high priority. But Patel’s goal wasn’t to come in and change the way the school had been practicing nutrition. The formula that Korzun and Harris inserted yielded quality results.
“I solely wanted to identify areas where they need improvement,” Patel said. “I’ve seen what works and doesn’t work. I wanted to slowly implement things that could be changed in the moment, and not rock the boat too much.”
For the football team in particular, Patel’s behind-the-scenes work parlayed into success on the field. After Oregon’s 59-20 victory over Florida State in the Rose Bowl, then-injured wide receiver Bralon Addison was quick to identify people like Patel as a part of the team’s success.
“This is one big family,” he said, referring to Patel, the strength and conditioning coaches, the tutors and everyone that helped the team. “Without them, we can’t do what we do.”
Now, as spring football enters its second week of practices, Patel gets to implement a system created under his own discretion. He said, before the National Championship Game, that players had already approached him about designing diet plans to fit their goals for the next year.
Going through an entire year under his plan is the next step Patel wishes to take at Oregon.
“Just to see how it goes from fall term to spring term. From that, I’ll know exactly how to do my job the way it should be done.”
Follow Joseph Hoyt on Twitter @JoeJHoyt