Towerview September 2016

TOWERVIEW THE CHRONICLE’S NEWS AND CULTURE MAGAZINE

> SEPTEMBER 2016 | VOL. 18 | ISSUE 1

Trump supporters on campus—page 3 Rituals of women’s soccer—page 4

New tools for athletic nutrition—page 5

2 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2016

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TOWERVIEW WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 | 3

Duke students for Trump?

Examining the ‘silent crowd’ of Trump supporters on campus Rachel Chason The Chronicle First-year Mitchell Siegel is a typical Duke student in many ways.

He’s from New York, lives in Giles residence hall and is interested in politics.

But unlike most politically-engaged Duke students, Siegel isn’t a Democrat or moderate Republican upset with the current campaign. Instead, he’s a Donald Trump supporter.

The Long Island native says that although he was a cautious supporter at first and still thinks some of Trump’s rhetoric is “ill-advised,” he believes the Republican nominee is the strongest candidate on the issues he cares about most—the economy, immigration and national security. He added that he “leans left” on certain social issues but thinks they are ultimately up to states to legislate.

“The first reaction I get is, ‘You support Trump? How?,’” said Siegel, who explained that he has been vocal about his support on campus. “I give them reasons, and then they respect it.”

He said he’s had many conversations with students in his dorm about his support and added that although most disagree with his positions, they are willing to have a conversation and hear his views.

“My whole goal is to make it known that being a young conservative or a young Trump supporter is not a crime,” Siegel said. “It’s legitimate to be a Republican.”

And he said he’s not alone. Siegel described “a silent crowd” of Trump supporters at Duke, but noted few are willing to go public with their support.

“This is the most left-leaning place I’ve ever seen in my life, to be honest. But it doesn’t faze me. I’m willing to openly come out,” Siegel said. “Not all people who support Trump are bad. That’s a stereotype I’ve seen not just on college campuses, but everywhere. There are good people who support him.”

Towerview spoke to four student Trump supporters, including Siegel, and one Trump-supporting professor to examine what it is like to be part of this “silent crowd” on a predominantly Democratic campus.

The democratic Duke bubble Siegel may have been right that a crowd of Trump supporters exists at Duke, and if it exists, he is right that it is—largely—silent.

Polling website RealClearPolitics shows Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary

Special to The Chronicle First-year Nikhil Sridhar (top left), first-year Mitchell Siegel (top right), grad school student Jackson Berger (bottom left) and senior Harrison Ferlauto are among the students at Duke supporting Trump.

Clinton deadlocked in North Carolina, with Trump beating Clinton by less than one percent as of Sept. 27. If the race were held on Duke’s campus, however, it would be less of a nail-biter and more of a landslide.

During an anonymous and unscientific poll of 110 students in West Union last week, 85 students said they would vote for Clinton, seven said they would not vote, 10 said they were not sure who they would vote for, six said they would vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson and two said they would “probably” vote for Trump— adding that they would rather not talk more about it. That would put Trump’s support, at less than 2 percent among Duke students.

Even the Duke College Republicans have “abstained” from endorsing Trump.

The organization chose not to support Trump but also not to issue a statement condemning him, as the Harvard Republican club did. Sophomore Madison Laton, a vice-chair of the Duke College Republicans, explained that the 15-member

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Donald Trump’s rhetoric on political correctness and economic issues resonates with his supporters—but has alienated many on Duke’s campus.

executive board was “split” on what to do, so it decided to take a vote.

“Not endorsing Trump won,” said Laton, who is from Atlanta and currently undecided about who she will vote for. “Then we had to decide what that would look like, and we decided that we would not issue a statement like the one Harvard issued. So we just abstained from endorsing him.”

Ryan Fournier, the president of Students for Trump, confirmed that the student-run national organization— which has more than 250 chapters nationwide and is in contact with Trump’s campaign but not directly affiliated with it—has no representatives on Duke’s campus. He noted that the organization has a strong presence at North Carolina State University and a “growing presence” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“At Duke, not so much,” said Fournier, a sophomore at Campbell University, located in Buies Creek, North Carolina outside of Raleigh.

The reluctance to support Trump is not limited to students. For the most part, Republican professors have also chosen not to publicly support Trump—a fact all four of the student Trump supporters that Towerview interviewed pointed out.

Peter Feaver, professor of political science and a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, said neither he nor any professors he knew of were supporting the Republican nominee. Feaver was one of 50 top Republican national security officials to sign a letter condemning Trump as lacking “the character, values and experience” to be president.

Johnson supporter Michael Munger, a political science professor and the director of the philosophy, politics and economics certificate, also said he does not know any faculty who openly support the Republican nominee.

Only one professor, Jerry Hough, James B. Duke professor of political science, told Towerview he is “pro-Trump.” Hough has

retired after teaching his last course on the American presidency this past Spring and is currently on leave.

The ‘silent crowd’ Hough and the four students interviewed—three undergraduates and one graduate school student—sometimes touched on similar themes, including the importance of ending political correctness and the need to reform the economy.

Other times, they varied wildly from each other on their positions, especially on social issues.

Hough, who attracted national attention for his controversial statements regarding race in a comment on a May 2015 article in The New York Times, described himself as a “New Deal Democrat” who thinks Clinton’s positions on the economy and foreign policy are “too far right.”

“I wanted a responsible candidate who would go back to the policies of Nixon,” said Hough, who initially supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. “Clinton and [President Barack] Obama are way to the right of Nixon on economic issues, and Hillary is probably to the right of Bill [Clinton] and Obama.”

Obama himself said the same in 2014, saying “in a lot of ways Richard Nixon was more liberal than I was.”

Hough, who said he resigned prior to the controversy stemming from his comments on The New York Times article in May 2015, noted that he is currently being paid half of his salary as part of his retirement package.

“We’ve got two awful candidates, but Trump is the better of the two,” said Hough, 81.

He said he recognizes that Trump is unpredictable—and called anyone who tries to predict what the Republican nominee will do “a fool”—but said he thinks the economic and foreign policy positions Trump has taken are superior to See TRUMP on Page 6

TOWERVIEW The Chronicle

4 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2016

X marks the shutout

Jack Dolgin, Sanjeev Dasgupta | The Chronicle and Chronicle File Photos 2004 women’s soccer players, pictured top-left, began marking their arms after shutouts that year. The tradition has evolved and is still popular this year.

Jack Dolgin The Chronicle When All-ACC defender Christina Gibbons dribbles down the field, you’ll notice something peculiar on her left arm.

The Raleigh native carries on a longstanding tradition for the Blue Devils— drawing an X for each shutout the team has recorded up to that point in the season on her fellow defenders’ arms.

She draws them on sunny days, rainy days and even cold ones when they wear long sleeves and no one can see the marks—with one exception.

“I don’t draw Chelsea [Burns’] because apparently Olivia [Erlbeck] draws Chelsea,” the senior co-captain said. “If someone drew it the first time, then they have to keep drawing it the rest of the time.”

College sports have traditions of highlighting performance with symbols, with perhaps the most famous example being the decals on each Ohio State football player’s helmet.

Duke’s tradition is not as dated, but is perhaps even more meaningful given that it is player-driven.

“I kind of took it over this year,” Gibbons said. “I guess, otherwise, it doesn’t really happen.”

‘I do shower’ Gibbons was first introduced to the ritual as a freshman, when she said she was just told to stick out her arm, and her teammate did the rest. As it turns out, a similar interaction likely took place when that senior was a freshman in 2010, when the seniors on her freshmen team were also rookies in 2007 and so on dating years back.

A dozen years, to be exact.

In 2004, Carolyn Ford—an All-American defender like Gibbons—began celebrating the defense’s accomplishments by writing “Pride in Zeros” on their arms. The team set a program record with seven straight shutouts and finished the year with 12— one shy of a school record.

Ford was surprised to see a similar tradition alive and well seven years later.

“I was watching the game and you could see the writing on their arms,” she told The Chronicle in 2011 after the Blue Devils fell 1-0 to Stanford in the national championship game. “I was thinking to myself, ‘I wonder if that has actually continued since when we were there.’”

None of the players or coaches on this year’s team knew just how far back it dated, even though head coach Robbie Church and assistant coach Carla Overbeck have been with the squad the whole time.

Photos from the team’s past years show a change from “Pride in Zeros” to X’s beginning in about 2007. But this year, the team has bought into the X’s perhaps more than ever, with the majority of players displaying them at some point this season. The practice has not just included defenders, either.

“Which I like more,” Church noted. “A shutout—everybody’s involved with it….

We give up a goal, everybody gives up a goal.”

In fact, the tradition has become so popular that last year, midfielders and forwards decided to leave their own mark, writing “O-line” on their right wrists. Junior Imani Dorsey and senior Toni Payne take the lead on that end, senior co-captain Lizzy Raben said.

As an unintended consequence, the Sharpie-to-skin combination can be a little tricky. Gibbons said the X’s take about three days to disappear, and by that time the team is likely playing the second of its weekend games thanks to a ThursdaySunday turnaround. She noted that it’s easier to just retrace the marks. “[It] makes it seem like I never shower, but I do shower,” Raben said.

Due to last year’s success—Duke finished tied for seventh in the country with 14 shutouts—players also wound up drawing on their arms heavily. For much of last season through the championship game, players had to get creative.

“Pyramid-style is usually the most

common… as we start to get more,” Gibbons said.

Others, like junior defender Morgan Reid, just employed a straight line of X’s, which wound up spanning the entire length of her forearm.

Hurricanes and apples It is clear sometimes from what a coach says whether or not they believe a team has chemistry. For Duke, Church does not even have to say anything. From spontaneous videos on Twitter to laughter on and around the field before games, the Blue Devils appear as close-knit as teams get.

“I was walking… to the new [athletics] cafeteria, and we were all really concerned that people were going to intermix sports,” Gibbons said. “We just wanted to sit with each other.”

Before each game, the team goes around in a wave-like motion and starts what Gibbons refers to as a “hurricane” of some sort. She also runs ahead of the team for the first warmup and high-fives everyone in a particular order, and the team places its gear in certain spots.

The quirks seemed rational last year, when Duke stayed together after a rough start to the season, beat North Carolina for just the third time ever and won five games in the NCAA tournament before falling in the national championship 1-0 to Penn State.

“Before one game, Krysia [Sikora] offered everyone in our class a bite of a single apple,” Raben said. “It got started a little bit before the [NCAA] tournament, and that’s when we started doing well, so we’re like, ‘Oh my God, we have to keep doing this every game.’”

“I don’t like apples, so it was a really big deal for me to do this,” Raben added.

“And then it became this team thing where everyone started to chant the name of the next biter,” Gibbons said. “[Lizzy] was last, so everyone would like freak out, and.... it would be like the smallest bite ever.”

Church actually has some of his own superstitions. Most notably, before each

game, whether home or away, he finds a concession stand and buys a beverage of some kind. Ideally he finds a Coke—not Diet—but he says he is willing to settle for a Pepsi.

“We’re all just like, ‘Yeah, we get it,’” Gibbons said. “And I guess if we were to be like, ‘Yeah we all take one bite of an apple,’ he’d be like, ‘Okay, whatever works.’”

A revamped culture Two years ago, Duke had one of its worst seasons under Church. After AllAmericans Natasha Anasi and Kaitlyn Kerr graduated, the Blue Devils missed the NCAA tournament for the first time in 12 years.

The following offseason, the team created mottos like “For each other” and “Be where your feet are,” which are displayed in the locker room. This year, players also have a team bracelet with three colors standing for the team’s values— heart, reliability and enjoyment.

Gibbons already wore a personal bracelet during her first three years with the Blue Devils, taping it around her left wrist during games. Now, she has added a second bracelet—the team’s—underneath the tape.

Another key change was one that is fairly unique. On most high school, college and professional teams, rookies are responsible for handling some equipment duties and menial tasks, either before or after practices and games.

But with the help of Greg Dale, Duke’s director of sports psychology and leadership programs, Raben and Gibbons live by a new motto.

“Service leadership,” Raben said, “where the leaders are serving the team.”

Before the Blue Devils’ most recent home game against Louisville, service leadership was on full display. Junior Casey Martinez and Gibbons picked up the cones after drills, and Raben brought back the case of Gatorade bottles from the middle of the field.

See SHUTOUT on Page 7

The Chronicle

TOWERVIEW WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 | 5

Smoothies, apps and buffets

Duke invests in the next athletics ‘arms race’ Amrith Ramkumar The Chronicle During the 2014-15 season, Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski coined the phrase “Eight is enough” to describe the Blue Devils’ championship run driven by eight players in the team’s rotation.

But eight was not nearly enough to count the number of post-practice recovery smoothies the team consumed on a regular basis. Duke got in the habit of tweeting pictures of its smoothies throughout the season, with one photo showing at least 24 smoothies with five different flavors for the Blue Devils to refuel. Part of the team’s nutrition room includes an iPad that displays various recipes for Gatorade recovery shakes.

On the football field, head coach David Cutcliffe and company have also prioritized nutrition, switching their caterer in Fall 2015 and dubbing this season the “year of the beast.”

The emphasis on nutrition at Duke is part of a nationwide trend. After Connecticut guard Shabazz Napier won the national championship in April 2014, he said that he sometimes went to bed “starving” because he couldn’t afford food.

A week later, the NCAA ruled that teams could provide unlimited food—a decision that had been recommended long before Napier’s comments—kicking off what has been dubbed “the next arms race in major sports” by The New York Times.

“The world has finally gotten the message of how important food really is,” said Franca Alphin, Duke’s director of nutrition services for student health who also oversees athletes’ nutrition.

‘They’d have no points’ In September 2015, the Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians Association reported that major college athletic programs on average more than doubled their nutrition spending from $534,000 to $1.3 million following the NCAA’s decision.

Duke athletics spokesman Art Chase declined to provide the department’s specific budget for nutrition but acknowledged that it is spending more on

Photo courtesy of Duke Athletics Duke athletes eat at the newly-opened cafeteria in Blue Devil Tower. The NCAA ruled in 2014 that teams could give their athletes unlimited food.

nutrition than it did in years past.

Last week, the University opened its first buffet-style training table for dinner that is available to all 26 varsity sports in the new Blue Devil Tower, which houses Wallace Wade Stadium’s press box and executive suites. Training table was previously only an option for men’s basketball and football, Alphin said, adding that one of the biggest results of the NCAA’s rule change is that teams can also provide snacks throughout the day and not just at meal times.

“Now they have access to more food.

You might say why does that make a difference? Because a lot of the athletes would come in here and I would talk to them, and they would be out of [food] points,” Alphin said. “They’d have no points, they would literally rely on friends to order food for them and I’d be educating them on how they should eat and what they should eat, and they’re like, ‘I have no money.’ That’s really hard to do sports nutrition education.”

Despite the increased importance of athletes’ nutrition, according to the

September 2015 CPSDA report, there were only 53 full-time college sports dietitians in the country—about one for every 9,000 NCAA athletes.

Because of Alphin’s other responsibilities at the University, she is not considered a full-time sports dietitian. She noted that many schools use a combination of full-time, parttime and contract dietitians, adding that fellow ACC schools like Virginia Tech and North Carolina have three sports dietitians. Alphin said that Duke could use more dietitians focused on sports— she is currently the only one in charge of overseeing nutrition for all approximately 600 Blue Devil athletes.

“From your mouth to God’s ears, I can only hope,” Alphin said. “I do what I can and I love what I do, and I will continue to do that. But certainly as a sports dietitian, my goal would be and I would hope that in the years to come, we’re going to have more support.”

has taken the task of educating athletes about nutrition into his own hands.

Senior fencer Joe Lam has worked with Alphin to create a startup called Brainbuild, which syncs athletes’ daily schedules with dietitian recommendations and on-campus food options to notify them of the ideal times to eat during the day and provide specific choices. The company uses Google Calendar and an app to provide timely reminders based on athletes’ schedules, and five schools are already using its product since its spring 2016 launch—Duke, Columbia, Cornell, UC San Diego and Emory.

Athletes across more than 16 sports are currently using it, according to Brainbuild’s website, and Lam noted that multiple other Division I programs are considering adding their athletes to the program. “[At Duke,] we give one person the role of taking care of something that is so important for all of these athletes,” Lam said. “Who eats more than athletes?

Everything in your training is affected by how you treat your body.”

A 20th-place finisher at the 2014 NCAA championship in the foil competition, Lam helped his uncle start a biotech company before coming to Duke. He went through the 500 Startups accelerator program as an employee of another company before realizing he could create his own company to act as a dietitian’s extender.

The San Francisco native did not compete on the fencing team last Spring as he launched Brainbuild, and although he is back training with the fencing team this year, he described the company as his “full-time obligation.”

“There’s no doubt that I’m definitely going to do this after graduate,” Lam said.

“I couldn’t see myself do anything else.”

‘More important than working out’ In addition to reminding athletes about the importance of timing with their meals, Brainbuild tries to make nutrition education more accessible and explain the importance of nutrient combinations—for example the balance between proteins, carbohydrates and fats when an athlete is From fencing to food apps trying not to gain weight.

Luckily for Alphin, one Duke athlete Alphin described the overwhelming number of pre- and post-workout options from shakes to bars and other snacks as a “whole new language” for many of the athletes that come to Duke, but noted many athletes that she works with take up cooking and even end up giving her new recipes.

An associate professor in the department of community and family medicine, Alphin does not want athletes counting calories and instead preaches plate balance and eating when most active, a message she tells all students.

Lam said eventually he hopes to make Brainbuild available to the general student population, noting “it’s not just knowing the data, it’s knowing what to do with it that matters.”

“You can use your Jawbone [app], you can use your MyFitnessPal app, you’re still not going to know every calorie,” Alphin said. “Most of you eat the bulk of your food from 5 o’clock on but you’re most active from when you get up during the day. We wonder why we gain weight. Because we’re eating a ton of calories when we’re sedentary rather than eating the calories when we need them.”

That message is perhaps most important in wrestling, a sport in which athletes

Photos courtesy of Brainbuild and Duke Athletics Brainbuild (left) is an app that provides an eating schedule for athletes. The training tables (right), where athletes gather for nutritious meals.

See NUTRITION on Page 7

6 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2016

TOWERVIEW The Chronicle

Rachel Baber | The Chronicle Students gathered at Devil’s Krafthouse to watch the first presidential debate Monday night.

TRUMP from page 3 Clinton’s.

Siegel and Nikhil Sridhar, also a firstyear, described themselves as traditional conservatives who are mainly concerned with the economic policies of the two candidates.

“When you’re talking about free trade, it has to be fair trade,” said Sridhar, who was born in Virginia but lived in India for the last 10 years. “These people we’re competing against don’t follow any sort of regulation standards. I think the big thing about Trump is that it’s Americanism, not globalism. It’s time to put America first.

We’ve given so much to the false song of globalism.”

Sridhar, who said his parents immigrated to the United States leg, explained that his international background has made him more aware of the concept of nationalism.

“You’ve got to love your country,” he said. “The great thing about Trump is that he said the era of nation-building is over. No other presidential candidate has said that.”

He echoed Trump’s stance on the ongoing conflict in Syria—which has led to more than 400,000 deaths and the displacement of more than four million people—arguing that the U.S. should build safe zones rather than allow refugees to enter the country.

“Their culture is not compatible with ours,” Sridhar said.

Like Sridhar, Harrison Ferlauto, a senior who described himself as a “paleoconservative,” also emphasized American nationalism and exceptionalism, describing the country as a “special place on Earth.” He accused Obama and Clinton of trying to make America more like Europe and said he wanted nothing to do with that.

“If I wanted to live in Switzerland or Sweden or Denmark, I would move there,” Ferlauto, who is from New York, said.

“People aren’t storming into the borders of Denmark to try to live in Denmark, but they’re storming into the borders of the United States, and they have been since its

inception. There is a reason for that.”

Ferlauto also noted that he likes Trump’s tax plan more than Clinton’s— although he personally believes the federal income tax is “illegitimate” and should be abolished altogether—and that he thinks Trump’s policies will best improve the job market.

He described a recent career fair at Duke as a “farce” and a “public relations event” and said it is too difficult for qualified college graduates to find jobs today.

“I don’t think that social issues are driving young people—I think what ought to be driving young people, and I think is driving young people, is the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to find a job,” Ferlauto said.

Ferlauto is socially conservative. He said that he views abortion as murder, and argued that drugs lead to the decline of society. When asked about protecting equal rights for the LGBT community, he said those rights already exist.

Jackson Berger, who has finished his coursework in the Masters of Engineering Management program and is currently finishing his independent study, also said he supports Trump because of his economic vision—but he differed sharply from Ferlauto on social issues.

The Maryland native, who attended Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate and now volunteers for the Trump campaign in North Carolina, described himself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal. He noted that he was a registered Democrat, and even voted for Obama in 2012.

“Trump is the first Republican nominee who really isn’t interested in social issues that much,” Berger said. “His entire campaign is based on big picture issues like immigration, the economy, national security, fighting terrorism—those kinds of issues.”

The Republican nominee has said that transgender people can use whichever bathroom they choose in Trump Tower, but has made conflicting statements on how he views North Carolina’s controversial House Bill 2, which makes transgender people use the bathroom of their biological sex.

Berger added that issues like these

are “not defining our time” and that he appreciates that Trump has not dwelled on them.

“I think our country is really at a precipice in terms of the direction it is going to go,” Berger said. “Are we going to go more toward a socialist economy, or are we going to reinvest in America and make business thrive again?”

Sometimes, those interviewed sounded like Trump at his most unfiltered.

“Millennials are a bunch of communists,” Sridhar declared, discussing Trump’s lagging support among voters.

Ferlauto compared abortion to the Holocaust, and insisted that history would prove him right.

“Historians will look at us as a generation that committed an atrocity against mankind, in the same way we look at Nazis who committed acts of atrocity against mankind,” he said.

A ‘hostile’ environment?

The students also differed in their experiences as vocal Trump supporters on campus.

Sridhar described the climate on campus as “hostile,” noting that people usually introduce him as a Trump supporter, which leads to a “starting point to hating on Trump and his supporters.”

“People are pretty hateful,” he said.

Ferlauto suggested that the environment on campus stifles Trump supporters. He said there is a “significant silent group” on campus that supports Trump, but that they remain silent because “it’s the only rational thing to be.”

“If you’re not silent, you run the risk of hurting yourself, hurting your career, hurting your standing among institutions that are, at the present, controlled by leftists,” he said.

But Siegel said that in his experience, students on campus are generally willing to listen to viewpoints different from their own—as long as you approach them in a specific way.

He said his strategy when discussing political views is to be calm, honest and realistic.

“Most people are willing to listen as long as you’re calm and say things practically and without trying to insult

people,” he explained.

Berger said that the campus “obviously leans left,” noting that almost all colleges do, but said he never experienced substantial hostility because of his support for Trump.

“I know at a lot of college campuses, to support Trump makes you a social pariah,” he said. “At Duke I never found that to be the case.”

The fight for North Carolina The Trump supporters interviewed by Towerview had a range of predictions for who will win North Carolina—which went to President Barack Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012—but all said it is going to be close.

Berger, a field organizer for Trump in North Raleigh, noted that one of the “phenomena of the Trump campaign has been that he’s bringing out people who haven’t voted before or typically don’t vote.”

In terms of strategy, that means the campaign isn’t just targeting the Republican base, but also those who might not typically be the target voter, Berger said.

Siegel, who doesn’t think experts can accurately predict the election, said that the race for North Carolina will be close— and added that“Trump needs it more than Clinton does.”

“If Clinton takes North Carolina, it’ll be a big blow for Trump,” he said.

The state is one where the youth vote could have one of the biggest impacts in the country—as it did in 2008, when young voters propelled Obama to a close victory.

A CBS survey conducted Aug. 30-Sept.

2 showed that 57 percent of 18-29 yearolds in the state said they would vote for Clinton if the election were being held today. Nineteen percent said they would vote for Trump.

But Sridhar expressed only optimism— for the outcome of the race in North Carolina and for the outcome of the national race.

“We’re going to win, and we’re going to win big,” he said.

“Believe me,” he added, echoing the favorite line of his favorite candidate.

The Chronicle

TOWERVIEW WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2016 | 7

SHUTOUT from page 4 “We don’t acknowledge class,” Gibbons said. “We realized [freshmen duties] sucked.”

After scoring the only goal in a 1-0 win against Minnesota Sept. 4, freshman Ella Stevens said nearly the same thing.

“Our team is one, and I don’t think we look at it like freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she said.

New year, new expectations This year’s Blue Devils came in with championship aspirations after returning 10 of 11 starters from their runner-up season and bringing in the No. 4 recruiting class in the country. And after their run last year and a week-long trip to China this summer, there was hope that the level of camaraderie would continue to climb heading into the season.

But the Blue Devils—facing one of the toughest schedules in the country—have not looked quite like themselves so far, with offensive inconsistency leading to a few early-season losses.

“People were saying, “Well, we’re not as close as we were in the Final Four,” Gibbons said. “When you go through the season—the ups and downs, tough losses and travel—all that brings you to eventually where we were.”

Duke was stunned 2-1 at Arkansas Aug. 26 in the team’s third game of the season.

During the next two weeks, it tied then-No. 8 North Carolina 0-0 before falling to fourthranked West Virginia at home 3-1.

Still, the Blue Devils are 7-2-2 and 2-01 in the ACC, with wins against three top20 teams and their best start in conference play since 2011.

A new year has also meant an influx of freshmen with different personalities and returning players growing into leaders.

Before every game, junior Abby Pyne links arms with goalkeeper E.J. Proctor as the classmates talk at length, even though Pyne will not play again in her career due to a slew of injuries. Sophomore Kat McDonald gives handshakes to several starters even when she does not start, running off the field right before the opening whistle.

“How I always think of teams is, ‘Who’s the glue that’s holding everyone together?’”

Gibbons said. “Abby has always been it for our team… but I think Kat has really come into that role this year.”

The Blue Devils hope their cohesion will help them weather a storm of tough opponents at the end of the regular season, including top-15 foes in Virginia, Florida State and Clemson.

If all goes well and the team sets itself up for another postseason run, perhaps Sikora will even bring back the apples.

NUTRITION from page 5 consistently have to watch their weight.

Senior Alex Belaia-Martiniouk has wrestled at 174 pounds and 184 pounds during his career, but said this year he will likely compete at 197 pounds. The North Olmsted, Ohio, native has used Brainbuild and noted that the consistent notifications and healthy food options made it easier to manage his schedule, which often includes two workouts per day as he practices at about 210 pounds ahead of the team’s season-opening event in November.

“Nutrition is really important. It’s more important than working out,” Belaia-Martiniouk said. “If you want to have good abs, if you want to look good and feel good, you have to have good nutrition. You can work out a lot and without good nutrition, you’re going to gain weight still.”

Senior swimmer Jessie Sutherland echoed Belaia-Martiniouk’s praise of Brainbuild, adding that after going through the company’s pilot program, she is trying to encourage her teammates to try it.

“Knowing the timing is really, really helpful. For swimming, we go horizontal.

A lot of sports stay upright,” Sutherland said. “If your stomach is full and you’re going [horizontal], you can feel that, and it’s not pleasant.”

athletes should not consume as many starches when not exercising as much.

She recently put together guidelines for athletes recovering from concussions, noting that the omega-3 fatty acids found in salmon, eggs and nuts could be particularly helpful.

“I didn’t realize how much of a difference eating made on your performance because I never really thought of it as you’re fueling your body,” Sutherland said.

As Brainbuild continues its expansion and schools continue competing for the best athletic dining venues, the NCAA’s latest arms race will likely keep impacting Duke for years to come.

But given the ratio of full-time dietitians to athletes and height of the pay-for-play debate, as NCAA President Mark Emmert noted in a 2015 interview with USA Today, the competition between schools might not be a bad thing.

“We still have a long way to do, but boy we’ve come a long way in the last two years,” Alphin said.

‘Research has finally caught up’ Alphin said she has been able to provide more specific tips recently than she was when she started working with athletics 17 years ago, in large part because nutrition has generated more research interest.

Many of her recommendations and pieces of advice from other dietitians are on Duke’s athletic website, and the University even created a Duke sports nutrition Twitter account in August 2015. Examples of how Alphin has been working more closely with athletes—she said coaches have reached out to her more since spring 2014—include explaining how injured competitors should adjust their diet.

Courtesy of Brainbuild Some of the tips Alphin provides Chronicle File Photo The app was designed by senior Joe Lam and are that whole grains can be anti- provides customized meal plans for athletes Team co-captain Christina Gibbons, who is in charge of drawing the X’s on defenders’ arms inflammatory, protein aids recovery and on different sports teams. before games, continues the ritual even when they wear long sleeves.

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