Bearcats in the Kitchen Program Teaches Athletes Food Fundamentals

The University of Cincinnati (UC) women’s volleyball team has spent the summer teaming up in the kitchen instead of on the court. They’ve been sharpening their cooking skills and nutritional knowledge as part of an eight-week pilot program called Bearcats in the Kitchen in the Department of Nutritional Sciences in the College of Allied Health Sciences (CAHS).   

Angela Bruzina, a graduate student studying nutrition at CAHS, worked with her adviser Sarah Couch, PhD, head of the CAHS Department of Nutritional Sciences in creating the Bearcats in the Kitchen program. Bruzina designed the course as part of her thesis, and worked with the athletics department to have the women’s volleyball team be her first group of students. 

As a nutrition graduate assistant at the UC Campus Recreation Center in the past school year, Bruzina helped develop and implement the sports nutrition curriculum for the UC Athletics Department, but felt there were some elements missing from that curriculum she could incorporate into the Bearcats in the Kitchen program.

"That’s when I kind of put the two together,” Bruzina says. "We were doing a lot of education-based things and a lot of activities, but not necessarily giving the students skills they needed to own their own nutrition plan.” 

Bruzina says the program, taught in a cooking and teaching lab in French East, lays a foundation with the basics. The players first learn about their caloric needs and how to meet those on a daily basis. Next up are lessons on snacking, food preparation and storage, and monitoring nutrition when eating out.

"It’s really a progressive curriculum and all of the recipes we have each week go along with that curriculum,” Bruzina says. "In the classroom, we do about 10 minutes of an education portion, based on the topic for the week. Then we move into a skill segment, so it’s a skill that they may need to use in the recipe. We demo that, we teach them step by step how to do prepare the recipe of the week.”

Helping out with the cooking portion of the program is chef Brandon Schlunt of Health Savor, a local company that offers home delivery of healthy organic meals to people living in the Cincinnati area. Some of the recipes cooked by the Bearcats in the Kitchen are his, while others are devised by Bruzina.

Bruzina earned her undergraduate degree in opera performance at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio, outside Cleveland. She decided to return to her hometown of Cincinnati following some soul-searching when she realized pursuing a career in the performing arts was not what she truly wanted to do for the rest of her life. 

"I really thought about what I wanted to do long-term and nutrition was something I was always interested in, so I came back here to get my master’s,” Bruzina says. "I previously taught music at a private arts center, so I love teaching, and think being a nutritionist is pretty much being a teacher. I need to be teaching people how to be healthy, because there are so many stigmas and myths and misnomers out there with what’s going on in the health industry.”

One indication that the program was a hit with the students is that while attendance was voluntary and no coaches were present, all 12 players went to every class. The plan is to continue the course in the fall and future semesters, but no specific athletic team has been identified to be the next group of Bearcats in the Kitchen.