Big Red Fueling Station

For student-athletes, balancing athletic, academic, and personal commitments regularly stretches their physical and mental boundaries. This often limits the students’ ability to properly fuel their bodies and brains, preventing them from reaching peak performance athletically, academically, and socially. The Big Red Fueling Station provides an opportunity for the Cornell Athletic department to directly address these concerns.

The fueling station provides student-athletes with fruit from Cornell Orchards, Trill-Yum trail mix, a variety of protein and snack bars, and Big Red Refuel—a protein and nutrient fortified chocolate milk developed by Clint Wattenberg, the Director of Sports Nutrition, and Jason Huck, the former Plant Manager at Cornell Dairy, and as written about in the New York Times. Beyond this, the station utilizes inventory management software to track and analyze what student-athletes eat, allowing for a comprehensive nutritional picture of our student-athletes.

The Big Red Fueling Station gives Cornell's Athletic department the opportunity to directly address the most commonly neglected and the most critical fueling opportunities of the day—before and after a workout. By opening the fueling station every day and placing it in the centrally located Bartels Hall athletes can easily grab a quick snack on their way to and from practice at no cost to them. For our student-athletes, class, studying, and labs or practice and strength and conditioning beat out sitting down to have a meal or a snack during the day. Instead of arriving to practice focused and primed for the work ahead, our athletes often come unprepared and depleted. A string of exhausting practices combined with inadequate fueling can quickly cause metabolic imbalances. For many student-athletes, the result is a physiological drive towards compulsive tendencies, stress, and binge eating at night.

Outside of the direct impact for our student-athletes, the Big Red Fueling Station makes use of Cornell's many resources: the dairy used for Big Red Refuel comes from Cornell's dairy cows; Big Red Refuel is made and processed at Cornell's dairy plant; the apples are from the Cornell Orchards; and Trill-Yum trail mix is produced by Cornell Dining. In the spirit of Cornell, the Big Red Fueling station highlights the university's collaborative spirit.  

Hitting our goal of $25,000 would support equipment start-up costs, including: iPads, IDScan hardware to track utilization and inventory, storage, staffing, and recurring food costs. With your help we will be able to cover these startup costs, allowing us to focus on providing direct nutritional support to Big Red student-athletes, allowing them to succeed in the classroom and on the field.