Everyone who works in performance nutrition knows who Caroline Mandel is.
And Mandel isn’t just known in sports nutrition — she’s the blueprint. Hired full-time in 2000 by Michigan athletics, Mandel etched her name in history as one of the first dieticians in collegiate athletics, and the first for the Wolverines.
“Caroline’s the OG,” Abigail O’Connor, Director of Michigan Football Nutrition, told The Michigan Daily. “… I already knew who Caroline was before Caroline knew who I was.”
Mandel is celebrating her 25th anniversary as the Director of Performance Nutrition this year, and has impacted each athlete she has worked with in that time. Her bubbly personality and drive to make people feel better have set the tone for the symbiotic relationship between athletics and nutrition at Michigan. Even as Wolverines come and go, they carry what they learned from Mandel into their adult lives.
But Mandel hasn’t just seen the changes the performance nutrition and diet industry has gone through, she’s been a part of that change. Her holistic, judgment-free approach to nutrition builds trust with her athletes. Meeting with her and learning about food doesn’t feel like a chore — they genuinely want to know more.
Through the decades, Mandel has stayed consistent in her commitment to Michigan athletics, regardless of how much is on her plate. Her attention to detail and dedication to individualizing nutrition to the athlete and the sport set her apart. While she works with just ice hockey, varsity and novice rowing, and men’s soccer now, she set the ‘fueling’ — as she likes to call it — standard for all varsity teams.
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Mandel’s journey in performance nutrition started in the performance space. Growing up in a physically active family with a former Division I swimmer as a father, Mandel was put into athletics early on. Once Title IX passed in 1972, she became a competitive swimmer and eventually attended UMass Amherst as a student athlete, earning a degree in exercise physiology.
Through her undergraduate connections, Mandel found herself in Ann Arbor for her masters degree, working in a lab under Dr. Victor Katch in Kinesiology. From there, Mandel began an internship in dietetics with MedSport, Michigan’s Sports Medicine program, and she fell in love with helping clients improve their lives through nutrition. On her second-to-last day, she was offered a position in preventative cardiology.
“Being part of preventive cardiology and MedSport, I had so much exposure to sports through the med sports side and the orthopedic surgeon side,” Mandel told The Daily. “… They would refer athletes to me to help them with their nutrition because they knew I had that background. So I started really honing my skills and looking at the science and evidence behind nutrition to help with performance, recovery, hydration, injury prevention and injury recovery.”
As she became more well-known throughout MedSport, Mandel was referred to the Michigan women’s swim and dive team to work as a consultant. Her swimming background and understanding of not only the sport, but also of the way swimmers practice and compete, made her the ideal person to discuss nutrition with the team.
But once she started working with the women’s swim team, the other varsity sports got jealous. They, too, wanted to utilize Mandel’s expertise to better their athletes. First came the call from gymnastics. Then came men’s swim and dive, soccer, softball and ice hockey.
Soon enough, she was offered a permanent position in 2000.
What started as a part-time job turned into a full-time career as Mandel worked with every single varsity sport for her first 12 years at Michigan. Despite being stretched thin across hundreds of student-athletes’ needs, she still found a way to dedicate herself to every single athlete she worked with. However, when she first started, NCAA legislation limited that dedication.
“Prior to 2009, if I gave an athlete a banana, it was an NCAA violation,” Mandel said. “It was considered an extra benefit. So, unless I stood out on the Diag and handed out a banana to every Michigan student, I couldn’t give a banana to an athlete.”
It wasn’t just bananas — it was everything. Mandel could give grocery store demonstrations or nutrition counseling, but to provide any form of fuel was an NCAA violation.
In 2009, the NCAA enacted the “fruits, nuts and bagels” legislation, allowing dietitians to provide just those three things to their athletes. In this form, spreads like jam and peanut butter — made up of fruits and nuts, respectively — were forbidden. So dieticians fought to change the legislation, and its second iteration included spreads.
Eventually, in 2014, the NCAA lifted its feeding regulations, giving collegiate dieticians full agency. From there, sports nutrition in collegiate athletics took off, and Mandel could finally help her athletes to the full extent she always wanted to.
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In early March every year, the Michigan rowing team goes on a training trip to Tennessee, conducting high-intensity training on and off the water while focusing on their development.
That kind of training can take an extreme toll on the body without proper fueling. And in a roster with dozens of athletes, it can be easy for some to fly under the radar and not treat their bodies well.
Mandel doesn’t let that happen, though. She travels with the team, spending the entire week with the rowers and the staff, and she ensures every single person on the team gets what they need to be successful during the week and leaves the training trip stronger and better than when they got there.
“She came on the trip, she fed the team,” Michigan rowing associate head coach Liz Tuppen told The Daily. “She went out and pre-planned all the groceries, stocked a restaurant full of food, ordered the athletes everything they needed, restocked it every day, does all of the to-go meals. If she wasn’t doing what she’s doing, I wouldn’t be able to coach.”
Before 2009, Mandel may not have been able to give her athletes a single banana. But now, she can provide hundreds of them — and then some. By the end of the trip, she had gone through 100 pounds of strawberries, 68 pounds of blueberries, 64 quarts of Greek yogurt, 468 bagels, 50 gallons of milk and 202 pounds of bananas.
Mandel’s approach to nutrition puts the athlete’s needs and wants first. She recognizes dietary restrictions, allergies and underlying health conditions and adapts her approach to the individual. The hockey fueling room houses a labeled, separate blender so the skaters with nut allergies can avoid cross-contamination when making their famous smoothies, for example. She even recognizes that sometimes people just don’t like something, and she finds substitutions that will still provide the fuel they need to compete to their full potential.
With Mandel at the helm, athletes and coaches alike can assume every detail will be accounted for and taken care of.
Mandel also takes a holistic approach to fueling and nutrition in coordination with the training staff of each sport she works with. Using DEXA Body Scanners, Mandel receives information on each athlete’s body composition and calculates each individual’s macronutrient needs. How they fuel themselves depends on a multitude of factors from injury recovery and prevention to body composition to the sport they compete in and when in the season it is. Using the “Teamworks” app, where each athlete has their own portal, Mandel constantly checks on the athletes and gives snack and meal suggestions based on their daily routines.
“No one wants to count calories, no one wants to count grams, and I don’t necessarily want people to do that, because I think it can be triggering and make people really stressed,” Mandel said. “And I’m not here to stress people out. … The thing I always want to ask first is, ‘Are you getting enough of what you need when you need it?’ because I think that’s a different perspective than people expect from a dietician. … I don’t demonize food.”
Her passion for food and fueling has rubbed off on her athletes. Because of how detail-oriented she is and how much effort she puts into each athlete’s health journey, her athletes don’t feel like working with Mandel is something they have to do. It’s something they get to do. She still has former athletes reach out to her and ask for recipes or advice, and one of her former rowers, Andrea Darby, even works for Mandel now as an assistant director of performance nutrition.
Mandel’s impact on performance nutrition is palpable. Since starting the performance nutrition department at Michigan 25 years ago, she has hired a nine-person staff — mostly women — and advocated for football to get its own nutrition team. She’s implemented technology and adapted to new research to ensure the health of her athletes, while they’re at Michigan and beyond.
“I would love for someone to be making overnight oats five years after they leave their athletic career and go, ‘Gosh, I learned that at Michigan,’ ” Mandel said. “I mean that, to me, would be the lasting legacy I would love to leave.”
And she’s already left that legacy — not just at Michigan, but across the country. From taking athletes on grocery trips to teaching them how to make overnight oats, Mandel has advocated for the health of student athletes for over two decades. Additionally, she’s advocated for the significance of nutrition on athletic performance and shown how hydration and proper fueling can lead to in-game performance.
Everyone in performance nutrition knows Mandel, and everyone in performance nutrition loves Mandel. At a collegiate performance nutrition conference last May, the dieticians in attendance attempted to take a photo with everyone who had ever worked with or learned from Mandel. But there were so many people that she had impacted, they simply couldn’t all fit in the frame. The legacy she leaves isn’t just with athletes, but it’s with anyone who has had the pleasure to work with her.
Because, as O’Connor said, Mandel is the original collegiate dietician. But she isn’t just the original dietician, she’s set the standard for what being a dietician should look like. In individualizing her work through fueling college athletes for decades, Mandel has also fueled the industry — and now, both are thriving.
