How USC’s new football nutritionist brings ‘pro level’ approach to Gamecocks

Share research papers. Schedule athlete meetings. Create PowerPoint presentations. Prepare meal plans. Analyze lab work.

Yimy Queipo Rodriguez does all this in his office at South Carolina’s football operations building, where the shelves behind his desk are mostly empty but hold a baseball glove, a few books and a Gamecocks hat.

Rodriguez then goes to football practice before returning to his research, meetings and more PowerPoints. It’s just a normal day for Rodriguez, the football program’s new director of football nutrition.

The Gamecocks’ newest nutritionist moved from Chicago to South Carolina just months ago, starting the job in March. For Rodriguez, who has a pro baseball background, a college football job’s appeal was in finding a way to make an impact in a new sport.

“It’s crazy how it works,” Rodriguez said. “It’s all about wanting to pursue a new challenge.”

Day-to-day changes

Rodriguez spent much of his life playing baseball as a right-handed pitcher. He started in Little League in Isla de la Juventud, Cuba and was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2010. An elbow injury ended Rodriguez’ baseball career, and he turned his focus to nutrition.

“Not that it doesn’t have the same impact in baseball, but it really, really does make a huge difference here,” Rodriguez said. “So I wanted to be in a place where I could see that, see my passion and my vision and kind of flourish.”

Rodriguez earned his certification as a clinical nutritionist in 2017, working at the University of Rochester Athletics for five years. He spent 2022 as a performance dietitian for the Chicago Cubs, doing many of the same things he does now with the Gamecocks — including nutrition education and meal plan assistance.

Then, Rodriguez felt it was time for a new challenge, and an entirely new sport — and took the job with the Gamecocks. He replaced Kristin Coggin, who spent six years in the role at USC before leaving for the same role at Nebraska. Rodriguez wasn’t the program’s only new performance dietitian: USC added Rodriguez and assistant director of football nutrition Jennifer Goldstein. The two began working in March.

Starting out, Rodriguez admitted he didn’t know much about football, just that it was a hands-on sport that requires a lot of detailed planning. He never played football but casually watched it on TV. To catch up, Rodriguez spent most of the spring and summer learning how the sport works — participating in team lifts and observing practices from the sidelines to understand where his expertise and the game intersect.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to be proficient at understanding plays and all that,” Rodriguez said. “But more so from the performance standpoint, and nutrition standpoint, being involved in what they do will help tremendously to understand who looks tired.”

He’s in the process of creating an entirely new nutrition system for USC, focusing on bringing the football players to a “pro level” with individualized plans for position-specific body types. Rodriguez said the professional approach is about increasing the players’ knowledge of nutrition through protocols and education so their bodies can adjust to high levels of exercise and sustain it for a long period of time.

The desired results would give players the ability to recover faster, limit fatigue and build the right metabolic formula to endure a 12-week season. This requires knowing what and when to eat, getting enough sleep and hydrating.

Rodriguez is a science-based nutritionist. He likes numbers and the small details that go into nutrition. While this new program has worked elsewhere, he said it’s still in a “testing phase” at South Carolina.

“I think we need a little bit more time in terms of collecting some data, whether it be body composition or lab work that we do,” he said. “I think over time in a few months, that’s when we get those objective measurements, and we can see it, physically on paper, ‘OK, these guys are making a change.’ ”

Adjusting for football

Rodriguez’s research-focused mind extends into planning meals for South Carolina, too. He reads research papers and shares them with his team of student dietitians and Goldstein, while trying to analyze if a specific strategy will work for an individual player.

Rodriguez and Goldstein spend lots of time during the week planning and coordinating the hundreds of meals and snacks needed for home and away football games. He said road games are trickier, just because they requires more upfront planning.

“There’s a lot of, ‘What do we need to bring?’ ” Rodriguez said. “Can we apply our protocols, whether it be the supplement protocols and specific nutrient protocols that we have in place, on the road? And what do we need to bring to make that happen.”

A big factor is the various levels of energy exertion between the different positions on the field.

In football, there’s a much wider range of body compositions and weight (the Gamecocks range from 161 to 338 pounds), compared with Rodriguez’s experience with baseball (the Cubs roster varies from 145 to 230 pounds). Because of that, Rodriguez opted to create three different groups to help determine the proper nutrition plan for each one.

Factor in anything specific a player needs — such as dealing with allergies, muscle growth, etc. — and that’s the general idea.

It’s easier to teach the freshmen his new program as compared to the older players, he said, because there’s a “clean slate” rather than reteaching basic principles to players who already have a routine established. It’s not that the veterans don’t buy into Rodriguez’ ideas, but the director said freshmen seem to cling to this new plan faster than the others.

There haven’t been a lot of cooking classes just yet, Rodriguez said, since he’s mostly teaching through one-on-one meetings and group lectures. Eventually, Rodriguez hopes to bring back cooking classes — knowing there are a few chefs somewhere on the Gamecocks roster.

“We’ve got some good cooks, from what I hear from all the guys,” he said, laughing. “And there’s some other guys that might burn down, you know, a house. And that’s why we’ve got to be a little bit more intentional with our cooking demos.”

Building off the initial success

The Gamecocks are still in the early stages of the new program. Rodriguez started at USC in March and spent a good bit of time learning the differences between nutrition needs for college football players as compared to his previous experience with collegiate and professional baseball players.

The biggest difference he’s noticed so far is the full-body mobility required for college football, and how players are required to maintain that mobility for extended periods of time. Plus, the different ranges in body weight from football to baseball also change a body’s composition. Because of that, the emphasis on conditioning is so much higher than baseball.

Rodriguez and his team won’t know the true extent of this new nutrition program for some time, after multiple rounds of “metabolic tests” throughout the season. However, he’s felt confident in the Gamecocks’ initial results.

Players have said they’ve felt stronger or faster this season, including Tyreek Johnson. The redshirt senior edge rusher said during training camp he had the highest bench press of the position group (400 pounds max) because he’d been working with Rodriguez’ team.

“They’re trying to learn what works for us and what doesn’t,” Johnson said Aug 11. “We also started playing with different vitamins than we did last year, and he’s really making a big emphasis on us learning how to take control of our own nutrition and not just putting it all on himself.”

Rodriguez said he’s noticed changes like Johnson’s as well, but a new bench max isn’t the nutritionist’s end point. Until he sees these changes for the entire season, Rodriguez will keep working out of his mostly-bare office space, waiting for it all to show up on the football field.

“It’s been a whole re-introduction of how to look at how these athletes should look at nutrition,” Rodriguez said. “And I think it’s just a matter of time when that snowball kind of just keeps going, and everybody will be on the same page.”