Eating to win: NHL stars find an edge by focusing on nutrition
Philipp Grubauer didn’t feel bad, exactly. He didn’t feel good, either.
The goaltender was merely coasting along during his inaugural season with the Colorado Avalanche in 2018-19, preparing for games as he always had and ignoring — at first — his body’s increasing lethargy.
At the time Grubauer was like most of his NHL peers, wielding a meticulous and well-thought-out pregame routine that didn’t include questioning how — or, more importantly, why — he was eating certain things. Convenience trumped everything.
And then, Grubauer hit a wall.
“I didn’t really pay attention to food my first years in the league. It wasn’t a big thing,” Grubauer told ESPN last month. “But the more I thought about it, I was actually feeling pretty tired [during games]. Like probably around the first or second period, I was usually pretty tired, and I would pump myself full of energy bars and all that [processed] stuff in between periods.
“It probably wasn’t right. But time is really short to cook something at home. By the time you get home from morning skate and have your nap, you almost have to get right back. I needed a way to make food easy so I could focus more on the game.”
It was around then that Grubauer, who now plays for the Seattle Kraken, received a call from Amanda Gyuran. She’s a Denver-based performance chef and co-founder of Elevated Eats, a meal prep service for professional athletes. The two got to talking, and Grubauer thought he had found a perfect solution, someone to design and execute an eating plan with minimal effort required on his part.
He signed on to be Gyuran’s client. It was the first step in an eye-opening journey ahead.
“At first it was just about the food,” Grubauer said. “And then we got rolling and we did a couple of tests, like gut tests and DNA tests where it shows what your body can absorb or what nutrients it can’t absorb. Like, from eating steak, your body might not pull iron out of the steak; it might pull it better out of salmon for example or from a different vegetable. So, from the time Amanda started cooking for me, we got it dialed in a little bit more and more.”
Welcome to the world of designer athlete nutrition. It’s an increasingly popular trend in an industry where longevity is paramount, execution is key and finding the slightest edge can add extra zeros to a paycheck.
GYURAN WORKS WITH players across every major sport, each with their own motivations for seeking out an alternative health approach but with a common goal of maximizing their potential. That requires taking an individual outlook on each person and getting down to the nitty-gritty of what makes their body tick.
“Before anything else, I have all my athletes go through advanced functional lab work with medical and naturopathic doctors,” Gyuran said. “That’s really their blood markers, stool, urine, genetics. That really helps us to customize both the supplements and meal plans we give them based on exactly what’s going on inside. We also test what antioxidants their bodies respond best with, and everyone is so different.”
That might be true on the genetics side. But through uncovering the unique variabilities of each client, Gyuran also found that athletes within certain sports were more alike internally than you’d expect.
“What’s kind of cool is that, especially with hockey players, they have a lot of similar things in their lab work around hormone levels and vitamin deficiencies,” Gyuran said. “It’s the lab work that really makes what we do most effective, because really anyone can make healthy foods for an athlete. But adding in all of these really specific ingredients helps us to give every meal a purpose.”
It’s an approach tailor-made for an athlete’s framework, the same way his skates are sized to an individual foot. When Kylene Bogden, a board-certified sports dietitian and functional nutritionist, was working at Cleveland Clinic early in her career, she began seeing players drawn to that more holistic, progressive approach in addressing not just food issues but overall health concerns.
She recalls one athlete who had no idea he was living with a dairy allergy. His daily bowls of cereal were causing unexplained chronic congestion and fatigue that wouldn’t resolve and ultimately impacted his performance. Bogden discovered the issue via blood work and within a day, she realized, “he could breathe again.”
“You’d see some of these athletes, and they weren’t healthy,” Bogden said. “They were bloated after every meal or they had a face full of acne, eczema, psoriasis, hives. They’re taking [medicine] every day to get through the season because of how crazy their allergies are. This is not OK. We have to dive deeper than this basic surface-level, conventional nutrition approach because it’s one thing to have a low body fat. But if your total body health is not in line, you’ll never reach peak performance, and we need to start making this unique to players.”
Having access to that standard of care and information is a privilege professional athletes have over the average person. Ditto being able to afford services like Gyuran’s that hand-deliver an optimal diet. It’s not a position Grubauer takes being in for granted, especially when the benefits of implementing his assigned changes came about more rapidly than expected.
“I would say [I felt different] in, like, a week,” he said. “Your body has to adjust a little bit, but once you eat the right stuff, your body starts to adapt right away. We were eating better, eating cleaner, and I didn’t have that tiredness anymore. So it started off just with food focus, and then once I got more knowledge behind her food and what she makes and the science behind it, it moved on to a different perspective.”
CALE MAKAR DOESN’T leave anything to chance. Not on the ice, not on his plate.
Colorado’s top-pairing defenseman found Gyuran when he ran up against some new dietary restrictions. Makar aimed to tackle the challenge head-on, and he relied on Gyuran’s adjustments to find a path forward supporting both his body and his play.
Makar was so impressed with the offerings and overall food philosophy that he began shunning some team-provided meals in favor of fueling road trips with Gyuran’s cooking too.
So Gyuran would pack Makar coolers to take with him. Then, rather than risk eating unknown fare in an unfamiliar city, Makar finds access to a microwave and heats up those preferred, pre-prepared dishes.
The reigning Norris and Conn Smythe trophy winner has no regrets.
“I take the pregames on the road, and I love it,” he said. “It can be a little bit of a hassle sometimes, but at the end of the day, I know exactly what I’m putting in my body, and there’s a convenience to it, for sure. It goes to the mental aspect of the game, knowing you don’t have any questions in the back of your mind: Did I do something wrong during the day? Did I not have the same pregame meal?
“You try to maintain and control everything that you can, and for me the diet aspect of it is definitely important.”
Not every athlete will be so fastidious about their eating, but Gyuran has seen a genuine uptick in the number who are. Like Makar, many are driven by mitigating the risk of switching up habits or by run-of-the-mill superstition that what worked well before one game will be the right choice again.
“A lot of the guys use the excuse of, ‘Oh, I’m already bringing so much stuff on the road’ or they don’t care enough to do it,” Gyuran said. “But the ones who do, they want to eat the food custom-made for them. So I vacuum seal meals in a cooler with their pregame meals or snacks in there. They’re getting muffins or recovery electrolyte gummies, or sometimes I’ll pack them up pregame drinks that really help to boost nitric oxide and blood flow and support their energy with beet juice and pomegranate juice. And then I add in specific ingredients based on their labs, whether it was B12 or the mushrooms that can help with energy and endurance.”
Those performance boosters were, until recently, a foreign concept to Makar. He admits to being a “picky eater” for much of his youth and to exploring the many dining hall options available during his first season at the University of Massachusetts in 2017-18.
When Makar arrived in the NHL two years later, he saw that some players were more careful about what they put in their body, and he got an education in the dressing room on how doing the right things nutritionally could lead to better results in his game.
Pivoting to Gyuran’s style of eating made that message hit home.
“Basically, all of my guys eat a Paleo-ish [diet],” she said. “It’s all gluten-free, soy-free and mostly dairy-free, with the exception of eating grass-fed butter and ghee sometimes. It’s refined-sugar-free and mostly grain-free. They’ll have white rice occasionally. But the focus is on high-quality organic grass-fed proteins. Starchy veggies and fruits are the carbohydrate sources. I find that a lot of athletes feel better on that.”
A typical meal for Makar consists of “sweet potato, maybe a little bit of rice, chicken, probably some salmon in there as well, and then usually there’s just some vegetables like a salad or some broccoli just to help digestion,” he said.
It’s a far cry from the stereotypical sustenance players are thought to be downing, such as sauce-laden pasta dishes or regular postgame pizzas. Those are still on the menu for some — and can certainly be seen now and then in the hallways outside an NHL dressing room — but Makar is among those who stick to what’s in his lunchbox.
“If you feel good when you’re eating a certain way, then it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “And in my mind, it’s just, ‘Why give up on that?’ Everybody’s always trying to get better, and that’s the atmosphere that you want. So regardless of if it’s during the game or food-wise, people are always looking for that edge.”
JAMES VAN RIEMSDYK recalls receiving some critical advice early in his career.
“I knew this performance coach years ago,” the Philadelphia Flyers winger said. “And I asked him, ‘What’s the one key thing that you’ve noticed from the guys that have longevity?’ And he goes, ‘They cut out all the bulls—.'”
That could be van Riemsdyk’s new mantra. The 33-year-old is in the latter half of his career and experiences the body changes that come with it. So even though van Riemsdyk gets “great care” from Philadelphia’s staff, he started exploring how to raise the bar in every health category and ensure more good years ahead on the ice.
“What [that coach] meant was that guys who last are very specific and intentional and targeted about what they’re trying to accomplish,” he said. “That’s training on the ice with skill work, but it’s also nutrition, sleep; they have it all in a good spot. You’ve got to know where your core principles should be. Those aren’t necessarily the flashiest things, but I think those are how you get the best results.”
Gyuran, who also works with van Riemsdyk, said the most common feedback she gets after a client switches diets is they “feel lighter and they can recover faster.” That was the most immediate change van Riemsdyk felt after implementing his own new regime, which includes functional mushrooms for focus, sunflower butter cups for a treat and a wide range of cuisines.
“The two biggest improvements are recovery and energy levels,” he said. “And then just how you sleep and how refreshed you feel waking up. I’ve always been into these sorts of things over the years and different edges you can find, whether it’s supplements or nutrition or training. There are different times where you have to get educated about how to support what you want to try to accomplish, and then how you can supplement your recovery and energy and all the good stuff.”
The process itself requires effort, though. Dr. Stephanie Canestraro is a certified functional medicine doctor and founder of the Vagus Clinic, through which she and her staff work with a wide range of athletes. Canestraro earns new clients via word of mouth from players who have shared her method on expanding good overall health. And that can be extensive. So Canestraro has to see where the commitment level is for each individual.
Basically, how bad do they want to feel good?
“We ask, ‘How many supplements are you willing to take?’ And we ask them how intense they want to be,” she said. “Because if a player gets supplement fatigue, they’ll stop. But when we have a full buy-in, we see results really quickly, even from adding one simple thing. A common issue we see is mitochondrial dysfunction. That’s how your cells make cellular energy. So if we do a test and see an area is low, we can add in one change [with a supplement] and they feel [improvement] right away. The more I explain to them why they’re taking each thing, the better they stick to it, and we try to make it as simple as possible.”
Canestraro said players who remove her protocols in the offseason frequently come back once preseason training ramps up again. It can be difficult to stick with the schedule she provides, but that looming issue of longevity — or lack thereof — brings athletes back.
“They know retrospectively that they felt better on the program,” she said. “And it’s a difference for them between potentially millions of dollars by playing better and getting a better contract the next year, or staying in the NHL and not going down to the AHL. So there’s a lot of stakes, and that’s when they’re usually more willing to really commit.”
Grubauer might be one of those well-paid players at the top of his game, but it isn’t lost on the 30-year-old that everyone has a shelf life. It’s worth embracing the Brussels sprouts to extend it.
“The biggest change since [getting a new food plan] is I think it almost cuts the recovery time in half. You have to take care of yourself to have a long career,” he said. “I introduced a lot of teammates to [different food ideas] because they’d go to McDonald’s after the game to get some food versus getting actually a good meal. That’s something that helps their body to recover and be ready for the next day, and that’s good for all of us.”
THE TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS love blasting music at practice. Behind the scenes, Margaret Hughes is their real master mixologist.
The Leafs’ lead performance dietitian makes it her mission to stave off nutritional boredom for players with an ever-changing playlist of post-workout provisions. It has become Hughes’ thing.
“The guys come off the ice, and I’ve prepared two or three different flavors of recovery shakes,” she said. “They get excited about taking the shake because they don’t know what flavor Margaret has come up with today. I come up with fun names too. I just really try to make food exciting and enjoyable for them as opposed to this traditional vanilla protein shake. In an 82-game regular season, that is going to get old very quickly.”
If there are more options than ever for getting outside help with diet, consider Hughes part of the in-house counsel for Maple Leafs players. About half of the NHL’s 32 clubs have dietitians and nutritionists working daily with players to promote their health goals, whether individually or in tandem with another trusted professional.
“We need to be collaborative,” Hughes said. “Our job is to ensure that every athlete is supported from all angles. My job is basically to complement them and ensure that whatever program is being recommended, I also support that and ensure that the athlete gets the best care that they possibly can. There’s lots of conversations and meetings between many professionals and practitioners.”
Hughes has a wide-ranging role with the Leafs that includes creating menus for the team plane, at hotels on the road and within visiting arenas. Toronto has two cooking staffs — one each at their home and practice rinks — with whom she designs the various plans. Chef Je-Marr Wright is at the helm of bringing Hughes’ culinary visions to life, and he shares her desire to keep things interesting for the players.
“I always try to make sure that September is different than October and then October is always different than November, and that way there’s always a variety of meals,” Wright said. “Players are really conscious about what they put into their body. They’ve definitely taken a big interest in actually knowing what they’re feeding themselves.”
Food is at the heart of Hughes’ focus. On the team side, they’re not providing “pills, powders and potions” so much as fresh fuel for players to choose from that’s readily available when they need it.
“We want to make sure that they’re consuming real food in real time,” she said. “We start with conversations around, ‘What part of the season are we in? What are the training demands? Which individuals may require more carbohydrates, less carbohydrates, more protein, less protein? Is it the day before a game?’
“Then maybe we focus more on carbohydrate-rich foods. Do we have a couple of days in between games? Then we start to look at how we can fit more vegetables and nutrient-dense foods in.”
That includes a keen focus on culturally appropriate meal offerings as well as introducing players to foods they might not have tried before. Wright said he recently added okra to the Leafs’ lunch options, a less familiar vegetable he hoped would land with guys, and perhaps become part of their eating rotation.
It’s a world away from the traditional white-carb-with-a-protein options — which Hughes acknowledges are still a go-to for some — but teams are cognizant of players seeking out nutrition-dense alternatives and have worked hard to provide them.
“The athletes are human, first and foremost. I think my job is to know them as people,” Hughes said. “We have players who come from various cultures, and we also try to understand how ethnic and cultural food preferences or traditional foods fit into their lives. Having access to whatever they need is the best way to optimize an athlete’s nutrition that matches their training demands, at the time that they need it.”
FOOD IS FUEL. Food can also be about pleasure, or having a good time with friends and family.
Even the most dedicated athletes deviate from their meal plan once in a while. But, like Makar making a bad read in front of the net, it doesn’t happen often.
“You allow yourself a few cheat meals,” Makar conceded. “Everybody would be lying if they said you’re eating the exact same way during the summer as you are in the season, for example. But for the most part, you don’t want to lose track of that sense of performance or trust in the eating habits that you have. You never stop doing what you can do to get that edge.”
When Grubauer was selected by Seattle in the 2021 NHL expansion draft after three seasons in Colorado (and nearly that long working with Gyuran) it was “really difficult” being in the Pacific Northwest without access to her meal prep. He actively tried bringing her out to cook for him, and she eventually trained someone Seattle-based in her method so there was a person with whom Grubauer and players like him could work.
“In our schedule and with the timeline during the season, you need to eat as well as you can to fuel your body,” Grubauer said. “And you want to get the best nutrition in order to be 100% the next day and perform at the highest level again and do it over and over again. I’m pretty superstitious, so if I felt like I had a good game, I want the same thing again.”
It’s about removing guesswork. Players spend hours studying video of opponents, searching for weaknesses to exploit and advantages to gain. Now that same focus is being turned onto the players themselves. Opening the door to individualized eating is a natural progression of dedication in athletes craving improvement by that proverbial 1% each day.
“I’m in the mindset that doing the right things is going to lead to better results,” Makar said. “And for me, the mental aspect of it and knowing exactly what you put in your body is a big part of it as well. It’s so important to just have all that super figured out and make sure there’s no surprises in terms of eating anything that I can’t control. You can never really go too wrong with that.”
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Ryan Hockensmith
HE IS HALF ASLEEP when he feels his dad slam the brakes of his van. Larry Pickett Jr.’s head darts up from the back seat, and he squints his eyes to try to understand the mayhem on the road in front of him.
Smoke rising. Cars stopped. Wires down. People standing around. A man stuck in a car — is he alive? Sparks buzz underneath his vehicle.
It’s midnight on Aug. 31, a few miles south of West Point, New York, where Pickett is a sophomore safety on the Army football team. About 20 different things are happening at once, with just enough headlights aimed in opposite directions to make it more blurred than illuminated in the cool late summer air. Fifty yards away, a closed Dunkin’ store provides a slight orange and pink tint in the background.
All six people in the van — Pickett, his mom, dad, two sisters and his girlfriend — are racing to synthesize what happened before they arrived. This is one of those rare moments in life that people stumble into, where they have to decide whether to run toward danger or stay safe on the perimeter.
Why isn’t anybody helping the driver? Why are they just standing there?
Pickett’s brain is different. He wanted to be in the Army when he was a preschooler, wearing camo for Halloween and watching “Saving Private Ryan” with his mom. He wasn’t drawn to the idea of war; he loved the military’s structure and insistence on thinking of others before oneself. So, when he had offers from schools such as Duke, NC State and South Carolina near his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, he chose Army to try to do something of maximum service with his life, as his parents and his Christian faith preach.
The whole scene is coming into focus now. A man clearly hit a utility pole, causing the power lines to fall and begin sparking about 10,000 volts of electricity into the air near the driver’s side door.
Pickett sits up in his seat but doesn’t say anything. Then a familiar voice cuts through the air: “Larry, you have to get that man out of the car,” his mom says. Pickett, 20, streaks out of the van, toward the car, the power line flopping and spraying electricity near the car.
He didn’t know it at the time, but in about 60 seconds, all four tires will pop, and the car will explode in flames.
WHEN PICKETT GETS to the car, the man isn’t moving. He’s staring off into space, blinking but frozen. Pickett notices a power line directly under the driver’s side, and he pauses for a moment. He feels heat pouring from inside of the car and he can’t help but wonder if the man is being electrocuted.
He hesitates for a moment, then says a prayer before he reaches his hands under the man’s armpits.
Phew. No jolt.
The car has become what electricity expert John Averrett calls a “Faraday cage,” which is a structure meant to conduct electricity — even from a lightning strike — without harming the person inside. The rubber tires can dump the voltage from the metal car into the ground without shocking the person inside.
Averrett, an electrical engineer who is licensed in 20 states and has done energy work for several NASA shuttles, has actually seen cases where people in cars think they are OK, then get out of the car and are killed by the voltage in the ground.
When Averrett analyzed the circumstances around what the Picketts encountered, he says that the scene was so hazardous that even if police or fire had gotten there first, they would have likely had to just watch the car go up in flames. “It’s in their training to not go within about 30 feet of potential live wires before the electricity is turned off for the entire area,” he says.
He pauses for a moment and then says, “If people knew more about electricity, they probably wouldn’t want it in their homes.”
Pickett feels nothing, though, as he grabs the driver’s body from behind the steering wheel. The man, David Denton, is lodged and motionless, and Pickett quickly realizes as he yanks on his body that he isn’t going to be able to maneuver the man out of the car and not hit the wire.
He pulls again, managing to get Denton angled out the side of the car, but he isn’t sure if he will be able to lug him any farther. The entire car seems to be getting hotter by the second. He feels like the clock is ticking down fast and he needs help.
That’s when he realizes someone is beside him at the exact moment he needs him. It’s one of his heroes — his dad, Larry Pickett, Sr.
THE HELP KICK-STARTS Pickett Jr. He muscles up and pulls the man’s torso out of the car. Larry Sr. gets under the man’s legs, but he immediately loses his footing and falls to his hip on the ground, dangerously close to the downed power line.
But he manages to scramble back to his feet and help carry the man across the street as another tire pops. “The best way to describe it is that it was like there were fireworks going off,” Pickett Jr. says.
His mom, Shawnonne, gets his 15-year-old sisters, Lauren and Olivia, into the van, as Lauren films most of the rescue. The scene is terrifying, even from a distance, but Shawnonne is heard on video urging them on.
Three decades earlier, she met Larry Sr. in what would be a great rom-com setup. Larry, 17, was riding in a friend’s car on Dec. 23, 1996, when a beautiful 15-year-old girl named Shawnonne (pronounced Shuh-known) Taylor made her way through a crosswalk in front of them. He felt like he was meant to talk to her, but his friend drove off before he could. An hour later, when he ran into her on another street in Raleigh, he felt like fate had swiped right on them.
Next, he pulled off an approach that will forever be a part of their family lore. He introduced himself to her, but instead of asking for her number, he wrote down his and handed it to her. She thought he was very good-looking and appreciated that he didn’t ask for her number — she considered it gentlemanly to leave her feeling no pressure to ever call. And the fact that he had a Nokia cellphone certainly didn’t hurt.
So, she did call — for 55 seconds. Back then, Pickett had a cellphone plan that allowed for one free minute before the rate jumped to 99 cents per minute. So, she started calling him to say she was home, then he would hang up and find a landline to call her back. Their relationship was forged on those calls, one 55-second “Hey, I’m home” at a time.
They started dating, and they haven’t stopped. They’re that couple who won’t stop saying nice things about each other, even if their spouse isn’t around. They go to church together and insist on a date night every week, usually to a local Steelers bar and restaurant, Overtime Sports Pub. Shawnonne’s brother, Ike Taylor, won two Super Bowls as a corner in Pittsburgh, so Pickett Sr. became an honorary Steelers fan. He even has a tattoo of the date they met and the GPS coordinates of the crosswalk. Everyone should love the way they do.
On the night of the accident, it’s her voice propelling son and husband along. She yells from the van as Larry Sr. and LJ (that’s what everybody in the family calls Larry Jr.) drag Denton across the road. Both of them are shocked at the visual of Denton’s eyes — open but empty, his arm dangling and scraping across the pavement of Route 9W. Police and fire crews arrive a few minutes later and set up a perimeter as they work to get the power company to shut down electricity to that corner of the town.
In the background, the car goes up in flames, all four tires melting down until the metal touches the ground. That amount of heat, Averrett says, will cause an explosion in just a few seconds, and that’s what happens. With the power off 20 minutes later, the local fire department is able to douse the flames before they reach a nearby propane tank.
Averrett is at a complete loss for how Denton and the Picketts survived such a dangerous scene. On a Zoom call, he just looks off into the distance and says, “You always hear that God has his hand on a lot of things. This may have been one of them.”
A month after the accident, Shawnonne sits beside Lauren and Olivia across the table from Larry Sr. and me at Overtime Sports Pub. I run through all the different ways that that night could have gone horribly wrong. All of the Picketts are attentive people — when someone is speaking, they never seem to be waiting to respond. They leave space for whatever someone is saying to them.
There’s silence when I get through with my list of terrible possibilities. A few seconds go by and nobody says anything. The girls’ eyes move from mom and dad, and then over to me. At first, I couldn’t quite decipher what the looks mean.
Then Larry Sr. speaks. “I’ve had people say we should have waited for the police to arrive,” he says. “But there’s no way he would have gotten out of that car.”
He’s not dramatic when he says it. It’s very monotone, like he’s reading off road directions. I stare over at Shawnonne, and so do the girls. I’m expecting her to have some second thoughts, to contemplate the idea that maybe in retrospect, they might have been a little more cautious.
But that’s not how the Picketts walk through the world. What happened that night was what needed to be done, and so it was done. They believe the right thing can sometimes be scary, but that’s because it’s the right thing, there shall be no handwringing, regardless of the outcome.
In a slow but emphatic voice, Shawnonne finally says, “I would change nothing about it,” and the whole table nods.
NEARLY 10 MINUTES after arriving at the scene, the Picketts sit across the street with Denton. He’s wide awake now but completely woozy. He’s on his butt on the ground, his back against Pickett Jr.’s legs.
“What car was that?” Denton asks.
“Your car,” Pickett Sr. says.
“That wasn’t my car.” Denton argues.
“It’s your car,” Pickett Jr. insists.
“You got to be kidding me,” Denton says.
They go back and forth some more with Denton, who seems disoriented and in disbelief. The entire time, he rests with Pickett Jr. as his backstop alongside the road. Eventually paramedics arrive and cart off Denton, who has only minor bumps and bruises. The Picketts have an Airbnb nearby, so they turn the van around and they all go home.
For the next few hours, adrenaline still surges through the entire family. They talk about the accident and try to piece together what must have happened. Their guess is about the same as what the facts ended up being: Denton, a 66-year-old MTA worker from New York City, had been at a party near West Point. On the trip home, he missed a turn on Route 9W, which is a treacherous, twisty four-lane road that runs beside the Hudson River to Army. Denton, who hadn’t been drinking, had driven straight through a curve into a telephone pole. But now he is going to be fine.
“I’m just thankful that we were in the right place at the right time,” Pickett Jr. says. “A lot of different things had to go right that night for it to work out the way that it did. I was just a small part of what happened.”
Larry Sr. is a wizard with cameras and video editing (he owns a multimedia company in Raleigh), so he takes the footage that Lauren had shot earlier in the night and makes a Facebook post before they go to bed. He keeps telling Pickett Jr. that he is a hero, and his son just smiles and shakes his head.
He’s a stoic 6-1 young man who is 195 pounds of “yes, sir” and “thank you, ma’am” and might very well be a starting safety for Army a year or two from now. But he is also very warm, with a smile that is easily accessible. Teammates gently goof on him for being so straightlaced, like the time players went around the room announcing their celebrity crush. When it was Pickett’s turn, he said, “My girlfriend,” and everybody yelled, “Shut up!” at him.
“She is my celebrity crush,” he insists.
Pickett Jr. continues to try to stiff-arm the compliments as he turns in for the night. But Larry Sr. is just too proud to not tell his son — and the world — what an awesome kid he has watched grow up. By the time Pickett’s head hits the pillow at around 3 a.m., he’s done cringing at his family for the night.
His last thought is, Wow, that really happened tonight.
Little does he know that as he brushes his teeth, a few million people around the world have begun to go wild over the Gen Zer who saved a guy’s life.
KIDS THESE DAYS, RIGHT? Perhaps no comment summarizes today’s youth better than this popular quote: “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants.”
Here’s the thing, though — that quote is from 1907, and it’s not even about the young people of 1907. That quote is pulled from a college dissertation written by a 24-year-old college student named Kenneth John Freeman, and he was actually summarizing how Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and the ancient Greeks panicked about the lazy, entitled, luxury-loving next generation of young people. Turns out, middle-aged humans have been using the same critiques for at least the last 2,500 or so years.
This age-old generational divide is, of course, a two-way street. Aristotle’s daughter was probably rolling her eyes as he told her to go touch some grass, then responding with her own version of “OK, boomer.”
But the Greeks never had smartphones, you’re probably saying. And that’s a fair point. Recent studies are showing that the digital world — specifically social media — might indeed have unprecedented ugly effects on brains, especially young brains. “There are reasons to be concerned,” says Maria Rosario de Guzman, a professor of child, youth and family studies at the University of Nebraska. “But it’s important to remember that we don’t know yet. Worrying about technology’s effects on kids is certainly not new.”
Rosario de Guzman cites remarkably similar moral panics over the past few centuries from middle-aged people about the next generation’s relationship with new inventions. The English freaked out in the late 1700s over the incredible brain rot that novels were creating for kids. Americans then had now-hilarious meltdowns in the 1930s over the dangers of the radio, followed by the same freak-outs in the 1950s about TV, the 1980s about Nintendos, the 1990s about the internet and now social media for the foreseeable future.
British psychology researcher Amy Orben recently coined a term for this consistent societal dread: The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics, named for the Greek mythological character doomed to an eternity of pushing a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down over and over again.
Rosario de Guzman is one of many experts who share those worries but also say to take a deep breath and try to zoom out to see the whole picture. Kids will always be one big sauce, a blend of ingredients that has, for centuries now, mostly ended up coming out just fine. “As we discuss all the problems facing this generation, just try to realize there are things to celebrate, too,” she says.
Touching grass is a foundational principle at Little People Preschool in Raleigh, where a young boy named Larry Pickett Jr. enrolled 17 years ago. This is the Pickett family business now — Shawnonne has gone from a teacher when Pickett Jr. was a toddler to co-owning the school with her husband. Larry Sr. joined her after a very successful 20-year career in auto sales. They loved the school so much that they had to buy it.
They had big ideas for the preschool. They wanted the kids to be around nature every single day, so they got two goats and a bunch of chickens and ducks that the students had to go feed and take care of daily. They also started growing flowers and vegetables in the backyard of the school with hopes of the kids tending to the garden themselves. Their goal was to be able to grow, harvest and cook some of their own vegetables for school lunches. Larry Sr. says that when former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper visited the school in 2023, Cooper toured the outdoor section and said, “I wish this place was around when my kids were in school.”
The biggest idea of all, though, was a different way to work with parents. On tours of the preschool, Shawnonne makes sure to let parents know that they have high standards at Little People for them, too. She tells them that any time there is a behavioral issue, the Picketts will want to discuss with them their attitude, not just the kids’ behavior. They truly believe that when they see a kid struggling, acting out or attached to devices, the parents should be held accountable, first and foremost.
“Kids are innocent and hopeful,” Shawnonne says. “Why are they trying to fill space in their lives with screens? That’s on us as adults. They have only been clouded with whatever you provided for them.”
If the Pickett kids are the end result of Little People Preschool’s “start with the parents” brand of raising kids, then it might be time to franchise the business nationwide. Larry Jr., Lauren and Olivia Pickett are all ridiculously nice and respectful straight-A students. Pickett Jr. calls home from West Point every evening to say goodnight to his 15-year-old sisters. Lauren loves drawing and the theater and thinks she wants to be involved in show business someday. Olivia is a little more reserved than her sister, but her parents believe she will be a fierce attorney someday. They’re all proud Little People Preschool graduates.
“My parents have always had a great passion to just help the kids of our generation — help nurture us, love us, help the kids love each other,” Larry Jr. says, “so that hopefully we can grow up in this world and go and do great things as we share that same love and compassion toward other people.”
The 2025-26 class of tiny humans at Little People Preschool are 100%, not from concentrate organic joy. Knox, Kylie, Nairobi and Ryley follow Miss Shameeka into the animal pen, and the goats, Ava and Goatie, come trucking out to greet them with a blast of bleats. The kids all scream, but it’s not a scared scream — more like exuberant kids if Mickey Mouse or Moana walked into the room. They feed the animals every day, even on this sloppy Wednesday in October. Miss Shameeka does most of the actual feeding as the kids goof around in the pen and pet the animals. They are close to nature and loving it, and Mr. Larry still belly laughs as he watches from the side of the pen as the kids jump around near the goats, ducks and chickens. The grass is wet and muddy on this day. But they’re touching it.
The 4-year-olds all go inside a few minutes later for a math lesson that Miss Shawnonne is going to teach. She comes in with one onion and a basket of tomatoes that she had gotten at a local farmer’s market a few days before. She puts the basket down and asks the kids to each pick out a tomato as she sets down a scale on the table.
The kids take turns grabbing a tomato. Then Miss Shawnonne wants them to compare the sizes of their tomato with the onion.
“I love tomatoes,” a little girl says. “They make ketchup!”
Miss Shameeka and Shawnonne both nod their heads as they set up a scale.
“But onions are nasty,” one boy says. Other kids all agree.
“They do have a strong flavor,” Miss Shawnonne says with a smile. “But they also are a part of lots of meals where you probably don’t even notice that they’re in there.”
For the next 15 minutes, the kids all make their predictions about weights for the onion and tomatoes, and there’s more joy and open-mindedness in this small classroom than in any screeching think piece about the participation trophy generation on the horizon.
After the lesson, Miss Shawnonne takes the vegetables into a small kitchen area outside the classroom. She washes them, then chops up and starts to fry everything — one “nasty” onion and about 10 tomatoes.
While the vegetables cook, Miss Shawnonne talks about how optimistic she is about the future. She believes these precious little humans will be awesome big people someday. “They’re going to be OK,” she says. “But we have to do our jobs as adults, too.”
Another 15 minutes later, the pasta and sauce are ready. The kids sit in their tiny chairs, with their tiny silverware and bowls, and they eat the lunch they had helped to make. They love their sauce, and maybe we should, too.
AT BREAKFAST THE morning after the accident, Pickett Jr.’s phone lights up with text messages in a group chat of Army defensive backs. A few of the guys had seen the video as it circulated overnight, and word quickly spread to the coaching staff.
By the time Army has a team meeting that Sunday afternoon, everybody knows — though Pickett is caught off guard when head coach Jeff Monken starts the meeting by saying, “It looks like we’ve got a hometown hero on this team!” Everybody whoops and hollers, and Pickett stands up to tell the story of what happened.
The coaches notice that when he tells the story, he recites the same basic facts that the video shows and that his dad described in the Facebook post. But they spot that his version emphasizes his dad’s role, and that Pickett’s dad had emphasized Pickett Jr.’s role. “That tells you why Larry is the person that he is,” Monken says. “They went together, then his dad took no credit. Then Larry tells the story and credits his dad.”
The next few months are a wild ride for the Picketts. News outlets across the U.S. write about them. And the whole family flies to Long Island, New York, for the Fox Nation Patriot Awards in November, where LJ is honored as a hero. He accepts the award and speaks for about a minute, thanking his family and Army.
At the end, the three Fox hosts announce there is a surprise guest: “David Denton, come on out.”
The crowd roars as Denton comes on stage and says to Pickett Jr., “You saved my life. God sent you as an angel that night.”
Denton then walks to the microphone. “If it wasn’t for him, I would not be here today,” Denton says. “And that lesson taught me a lot. … I’m always going to be in my life out there helping other people.
“I appreciate you. I thank you. Such a selfless act.”
ON NOV. 10, a week after visiting Pickett Jr. at West Point, I drive my daughter and her boyfriend to New York City for a Broadway show. They’re both awesome kids, high school seniors with big hearts and bright futures. They make me feel the same optimism as the Pickett family about the next generation.
But they’re also teenagers who speak a foreign language to a 48-year-old like me. For the first 30 minutes of the two-hour trip, I try to listen and participate in the conversation. There is talk of group texts, other group texts about those group texts, people liking Instagram posts but not liking others, people being “sus” or “crashing out” and a situation that required my daughter to say several times, with authority, “Facts.” (I believe that means something is, like, extremely true.) At one point, I suggest a pizza place in NYC where we could eat, and her boyfriend says, “Good shout,” which apparently means a teenager likes what you just said.
A few minutes later, my daughter starts playing videos from a kid on Instagram who has 420,000 followers who watch him go to stores and restaurants that are about to close for the night. He then says, “Let’s watch the lights turn off.”
Then the lights turn off.
That’s it. That’s the bit.
If there were a breathalyzer for having too much teenager nonsense in your bloodstream, I just flew past the legal limit.
I think, I’m out. I can’t listen to this.
So I put in my AirPods to listen to my very smart, important podcasts about, uh, MMA and the TV show “Survivor.”
But my mind gradually drifts from listening to a preview of UFC 322 back to the Larry Pickett Jr. story. I keep trying to get my head around what I want this story to mean. I want to talk about the incident itself with care, because, let’s be honest, not everybody should just read about him and decide to run into burning buildings. But we could all probably do a little more in our daily lives to make this world a better place for the kids we dump on all the time.
Or maybe I’m overcomplicating things? Maybe this is just a story about an impressive young person who did a beautiful thing, and that’s it. Perhaps this is a simple story that puts some optimism into the world about selfless young people.
As I drive, I keep coming back to something Shawnonne Pickett said at the Steelers bar about how when adults rail against kids these days, they’re often pointing fingers with no real good-faith purpose. “If everybody who said those things did something that day to enrich a young person’s life, can you imagine that world?” she says.
I actually can’t, I think. It feels like pessimism about kids, and the future is being implanted into my middle-aged brain every week, which allows me to blamelessly ascend to the same perch that Socrates once occupied, putting down the next generation because it might make me feel better about the life I have lived.
That abruptly brings me back to this moment in the car. My daughter and her boyfriend have drifted back to their devices, silently scrolling while I am disengaged listening to my podcasts. In the Picketts’ minds, that is not giving the kids something productive to fill the space. How could I whine later that my kids’ faces are glued to screens if I tune them out?
Right about then, I pull onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, a twisty four-lane road that cuts down toward the Bronx and Manhattan. It’s one of those roads that has straight stretches where everybody’s going 70, then a mile with three turns and a red light where traffic slows to 25.
Sort of like 9W, near West Point.
My daughter’s boyfriend makes a comment about how short the on-ramps are for the road, and my daughter chimes in that she doesn’t love this road and never wants to drive on it. I take out my AirPods and jump into the conversation, trying to be present with them. We talk together for a few minutes, laughing and enjoying ourselves.
Then it happens.
Cars swerving. Horns. Smoke. A big truck with its four-ways on. Frantic brake lights. Shattered glass. A car on its roof, still rocking. A woman running.
The accident must have begun 10 seconds before I get there.
I’m ashamed to admit it, but my first thought is, Damn, we are making really good time.
But my brain has been Pickett-pilled just enough that my second thought is a little less selfish. I veer off the road and park 20 feet from the crash. A black pickup truck stops in front of me as I turn toward my daughter and boyfriend to say, “No matter what, stay in the car.” I don’t tell her to do this, but my daughter dials 911.
The guy in the truck gets to the car first. The woman who ran from the driver’s side is sitting in the grass. She’s bleeding from her lip and wrist.
“Is there anybody else in the car?” he yells over the whir of cars still buzzing by. She doesn’t answer. She seems so shaken sitting on the ground beside the wreck.
We go over to the passenger side to try to open the door. It’s wedged into the pavement, the car’s weight pressing down on the door. There’s smoky air all over, so it’s impossible to see inside. I grab a hold of the door handle and yank as hard as I can. It makes a hideous cloying noise as the metal grinds against the road. But it starts to open, crushing pieces of broken glass as it slowly opens.
Oh no…
There’s an older woman, about 70, hanging upside down, her seat belt suspending her face down. The other guy runs to get a knife from his truck so we can cut her out of there. The air is tangy and gross — it’s from the airbags, not a fire.
I have to reach under her body to try to unlock the seat belt, and my face goes past hers. She’s looking out into nowhere, unblinking, and her forehead has blood all over it. That visual haunts me then and now, this poor person prone in the air, bleeding. Her arms are dangling, and I don’t see her blink.
She might already be gone.
I reach through and fumble at the seat belt. But her weight is so heavy that the belt is stretched taut. I lay down on the ground, the glass pieces poking into the knees of my jeans, and I get a shoulder under her body, just enough to take some pressure off the seat belt. After a second or two, I feel the click of the belt and I’m under her body enough that when she falls, I’m able to help her body flutter to the ground. I roll her onto her side, then to her butt.
She just blinked. Thank God. She’s moving. She’s alive.
The other guy gets back and grabs her legs. I take her shoulders, and we lug her over beside her daughter at the side of the road.
About two minutes later, a police officer and an EMT show up. They barely speak. They just go to work. Everybody seems fine. The car isn’t on fire, so this isn’t even remotely close to what the Picketts ran into. We’ve all convened in the grass near the older woman, who is now wrapped into several bright silver foil-ish warming sheets that the EMT provided. The daughter, who is maybe 40 years old, seems so relieved. She is dabbing blood off her lip, but she keeps saying thank you to everyone sitting nearby.
“Everything is OK now,” I say.
“I know,” she says back.
It’s been less than five minutes but feels like a lifetime. I’m able to stand back and watch as others show up to help. The adrenaline is wearing off a bit, so I can feel a bunch of small abrasions in my hands and legs from laying in the broken glass. Nothing serious.
The police officer is walking around surveying the scene as cars whiz by. Occasionally, a passing car hits some debris and causes a really jarring clank or crunch noise.
A woman is crouching behind the passenger, propping her up on the ground as the driver comes over and says that the older woman is her mom. Another woman appears out of nowhere with blue rubber gloves on — she says she’s a nurse and she starts wrapping the daughter’s hand in gauze.
The real hero might have been the guy with the truck, and the blinking lights a football field away. He had been right behind the car when it rolled, and he slowed to a stop and put his four-ways on — he essentially shut down traffic and prevented untold havoc behind the single-car accident.
The police officer eventually comes over and tells us all we can go. He makes a comment about how it’s probably safer if people clear out from the scene.
I look back at my car, and my daughter and her boyfriend are staring out the back window. I have a brief moment of panic.
Was it a bad idea to stop? I mean, I have two teenagers in the car, one of whom isn’t my kid.
As I watch this ragtag collection of strangers all pick themselves up off the ground, I’m struck by the humor of all of us crouched down, touching grass together. To this day, I don’t know their names. I don’t know what they do for a living. I don’t know what they all risked by trying to do the right thing.
And yet, I feel comfortable saying they all would probably agree with the words of Shawnonne Pickett: We would change nothing about it.
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Adam Rittenberg
Tennessee is targeting Penn State‘s Jim Knowles to be its defensive coordinator, and is expected to finalize a deal soon, sources told ESPN’s Pete Thamel.
Knowles, in his first season at Penn State, is not being retained by new Nittany Lions coach Matt Campbell. He came to Penn State from national champion Ohio State, as the linchpin of coach James Franklin’s 2025 staff, and received a three-year contract that made him one of the nation’s highest-paid assistants at $3.1 million annually. But Penn State fired Franklin just six games into the season.
Tennessee fired defensive coordinator Tim Banks on Monday, after five seasons with the school. Banks was a finalist for the Broyles Award, which goes to the nation’s top assistant, just last season and received a contract through the 2027 season. But the Vols regressed on defense this fall, slipping to 113th nationally in pass defense and allowing 33 or more points seven times, including 45 to Vanderbilt during a loss in the regular-season finale.
CBS first reported Knowles as a potential target for the Tennessee job.
Knowles was a finalist for the Broyles Award back in 2021, when he served as Oklahoma State‘s defensive coordinator. He then moved to Ohio State, where his 2024 defense led the nation in both fewest points allowed and fewest yards allowed. This season under Knowles, Penn State ranks 34th nationally in yards allowed and 37th in points allowed.
The 60-year-old Knowles also has held coordinator roles at Duke and Western Michigan, and served as Cornell’s coach from 2004 to 2009.
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Jake Trotter
Indiana is likely to be without Stephen Daley for the playoffs after the defensive end suffered an injury during the Big Ten championship postgame celebration, coach Curt Cignetti told reporters Wednesday.
Cignetti called the injury “serious” and said Daley is “probably” done for the season.
Daley, a senior who transferred in from Kent State this past offseason, ranks third nationally with 19 tackles for loss. He also has 5.5 sacks and 35 tackles, including three tackles and a sack in Indiana’s 13-10 win over Ohio State in the Big Ten title game.
Cignetti didn’t specify the injury, but confirmed it happened after the game, calling it “sort of unbelievable.” It’s unclear when the injury happened, but Daley was seen limping while high-fiving fans in the stands behind the end zone.
The undefeated Hoosiers, coming off their first Big Ten title since 1967, have a first-round bye in the playoff, then will face the winner of Oklahoma–Alabama in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.
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