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////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// As the strength and conditioning coach for Dartmouth football, Dave Jenkerson has seen linemen who played high school ball on the doughy side of 300 pounds arrive in Hanover needing to drop 20 or more pounds, and he's seen skinny wide receivers who were prep standouts at 180 desperately needing to tack on another 20 to keep from being broken in half. While the popular view of what a strength coach does is that it's all about the weight room, Jenkerson knows nothing good will happen if one component is missing. "The building block of everything we do starts with nutrition," Jenkerson said. "If we are not nutritionally sound everything that we do all the hard work for is going to suffer." Make no mistake, Jenkerson knows his way around the food pyramid. The guy is good. Still, there are times when he looks at the eating logs his players fill out and their weight and things simply don't add up. "I'll have a kid who is doing anything and everything I am asking of them and it's not working," Jenkerson said. "He has the caloric intake down. His protein levels, his carbohydrate levels, his fat levels are in the right balance. But he is still struggling to get where we need him to be. "That's when I can give Claudette a call and ask if there is something I haven't thought of," Jenkerson continued. "She can take a little closer look and really pinpoint what we may be missing." Claudette is dietitian Claudette Peck, a keystone of the DP2 program. Claudette Peck grew up in northern Vermont playing high school soccer, softball and field hockey near the Canadian border. After graduation she attended the University of Vermont where she thought she would be studying political science and ended up in applied science. She he earned a degree in dietetics from UVM, fulfilled her dietetic registration requirements from Boston University, and with a special interest in eating disorders added a master's degree in counseling at her alma mater. Hired as the first dietitian at the UVM health service, she felt fortunate that the same position opened up and she was hired at Dartmouth after her husband's job brought the pair to the Upper Valley in 2000. Although Peck continued to have an interest in eating disorders, she arrived at Dartmouth a time when the general population was becoming more attentive in what it was consuming. "The dietitian prior to myself was very focused on her clinical work with eating disorders, but there was a real interest in working more with the general population of students here as well as the large population of athletes that Dartmouth has compared to most schools this size," she explained. "So that became a really important part of my job." To that end, Peck started spending an hour or so each week across campus at the athletic complex, making herself available to basketball players and runners, swimmers and hockey players and others in what amounted to an open forum session. At the same time, she was finding more and more healthy but curious recreational athletes stopping in to see her at Dick's House, the home of the College health service. "We have a very active population," Peck said. "I think something like 75 percent of the students at Dartmouth participate in some type of athletics. They may not all be Division One athletes but there are intramural athletes, club sport folks, recreational athletes, runners. P E A K | S UMME R 2 0 1 3 27