ST. LOUIS — Following Syracuse’s practice at the Scottrade Center this past Saturday, Brad Pike was a one-man assembly line.

Without ever looking at his hands, Pike grabbed small plastic bags, filled them with ice, twisted a tie around the top and added to a pile at the end of the trainer’s table. He told players to come get their ice, held short side conversations with other staff members and even stole a glance or two at the basketball playing on the locker room’s TV. All while the ice kept flowing.

But for Pike, whose official title with Syracuse is assistant athletics director for sports medicine, post-practice icing is a simple task. Mindless, even. Just a small part of a season-long routine that keeps the Orange’s tight seven-man rotation as fresh as a tight seven-man rotation can be during an NCAA Tournament run in late March.

And as that routine rolls along, the same question always lingers in the back of Pike’s head. A very important question. A question that can be the difference between SU’s players feeling settled or unsatisfied at the end of the day. A question that everyone thinks about but Pike has to answer, not just for himself but for a team of college-aged men and the full Syracuse basketball staff.

What is the team’s next meal going to be?

“I plan all of our meals on the road,” Pike said, still twisting bags of ice. “… I want to make sure to fill their stomach up with good stuff so they’re not looking for bad stuff later.

“Or, if they do look for the bad stuff later, it’s going to be in a small amount versus, ‘I didn’t really like the food, I didn’t eat anything.’”

When Syracuse received an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament two Sundays ago, Pike started considering the travel variables: St. Louis, a city he hasn’t visited with the Orange, is in the Midwest. The Midwest traditionally has good beef. Beef is one of the core entrees of the Orange’s five-meal rotation. A good start, but only the beginning.

Pike then flipped open his laptop and got to work, pulling up a spreadsheet that shows every meal SU has eaten on the road over the last five or so seasons. He has the meals sorted by date, hotel and, most importantly, quality. He’s started to see trends in this matrix of ingredients and hotel chains, like what to eat in certain regions of the country and what different hotels make well. That was how he mapped each meal for the Orange’s five-day trip to St. Louis — which eventually included two wins in three days to advance to the Sweet 16. By 2 p.m. that Monday, Pike was finished and he called the St. Louis City Center Hotel to start discussing his meal-by-meal plan. When the Orange landed there Wednesday, the next step was to make sure it unfolded seamlessly.

“There are always wrinkles, like last year I gave in on bacon because Rakeem Christmas was a bacon addict,” Pike said. “But then I worry about the hotel keeping it crispy enough, and other things like trying to make the meals too gourmet and putting in oils and butters. We try and keep it a bit cleaner. This hotel in St. Louis did a great job of that, but I worry.”

A lot of what Syracuse does on the road, in terms of food, fits the season-long roadmap. Pike makes sure there are healthy sandwiches within an hour of the team’s workouts every day to restore the glycogen in the players’ muscles. He tries to make sure each rotational player drinks half his body weight in ounces of water every day, which decreases fatigue and gets rid of the byproducts of exercise. There’s always pasta the night before games. There’s always things to consider at breakfast, like if he can get the preferable cage-free eggs and which players’ stomachs are sensitive to certain “mixes” in the morning.

Somewhere in between all that, the meals are plugged in.

“It pretty much goes like this, Brad points us all to a room and then there’s just all this food in there,” said SU walk-on Doyin Akintobi-Adeyeye. “And really it’s like, ‘Damn, where did this all come from?’ We don’t even see it. And it’s not just food anyone can make, it’s good.”

Syracuse is already in Chicago, where a Friday night meeting with 11th-seeded Gonzaga awaits. Last weekend, Pike said he felt good knowing the team was probably staying in a nice hotel with a good chef. But there will always be questions. Is the cod as good there as it was in St. Louis? What’s the signature meat? What else does Chicago traditionally do well?

And then there’s the deep-dish pizza, a staple of the city’s food vernacular. Will there be room for that on the menu?

“Pizza is not bad,” Pike said smiling, then straightened his face and realized he’s responsible for 17 impulsive eaters. “I mean it can be bad. Anything in excess is bad. I’ll have to watch out for that.”

Published on March 23, 2016 at 11:31 pm

Contact Jesse: jcdoug01@syr.edu | @dougherty_jesse