When your sports team is on the road, nutrition is critical. Without proper nutrition, the team can’t perform as well as it should. You’ll wind up losing games and suffering more injuries on account of things like exhaustion, dehydration, and low blood sugar. Luckily, there’s a way around this. By ensuring that you’re packing plenty of fun, healthy snacks that travel well with your team, you can head off issues of low energy and poor performance at the pass, and ensure that your team continues to play just as well as usual, until the end of the last game!
Custom Snack Gear to Keep your Team Going
When it comes to customized sports team apparel, it’s time to think beyond custom sportswear, custom t-shirts, and custom baseball hats. Today, it’s all about custom snack gear that will keep your team fueled up and ready to play hard.
In addition to showcasing your team’s identity and helping to facilitate a real team spirit that extends far beyond the break bench, customized snack gear can also help prevent items from getting lost during travel. This can help cut down on your on-the-road expenses and ensure that you don’t have to keep replacing gear as the season goes on.
Get more inspiration for custom sportswear and gear
The Importance of Food That Travels Well
On the road, your players’ snacks need to be just as durable as they are. While there are dozens of healthful snack options, some of them (such as very soft fruits, like peaches) don’t travel very well. If you take foods like this with you, you wind up making a mess in the bus or personal cars, and throwing away lots of spoiled food at the end of the trip. Because of this, it’s essential to ensure that you’re taking only the foods that will travel best on the road.
The Best Snacks to Pack on the Road
When it comes to keeping your team healthy, active, and going, great food is key. Here are a few good health snack ideas for delicious, nutrition that travel well with your team.
- Infused waters. While soft fruits may not travel particularly well, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a place in on-the-road snacks for your team. Instead of packing whole soft fruits, consider putting them in infusion water bottles. Designed with a small in-bottle case to hold fruits like raspberries, peaches, blueberries, or even cucumbers, lemon, or limes, infusion water bottles serve the important purpose of keeping your team healthy, hydrated, and active all at once. For best results, pick a large water bottle that holds at least 20 oz. of water and help your team come up with fun, healthful infusion recipes. In addition to ensuring that your team is getting all of the nutritional benefits of fruits, infused waters also help them stay hydrated during long trips to games.
Tuna or turkey sandwiches. Both tuna and turkey are great healthy snack ideas and valuable sources of energy-dense protein, which can help keep your team going when things get tough. Ideal for a hearty lunch between games, these sandwiches can be dressed up with leafy greens, cucumbers, avocados, or tomatoes for an added nutritional kick. In addition to being dense in nutrients, these sandwiches are also easy to make on the road: turkey comes in pre-sliced deli packages and tuna travels in cans or foil packets, so it’s easy to bring them along without worrying about crushing or damaging them. While turkey (And tuna, once it’s been opened) do need to be kept cool, a simple custom cooler lunch bags can help ensure that these nutritional powerhouses don’t spoil during the trip. To make your lunch coolers extra cool, consider purchasing them in bulk and customizing them with your team’s logo or mascot.
- Electrolyte drinks or mixes. When players sweat, they lose electrolytes, and if they don’t replace them, muscle cramps and exhaustion can set in. To prevent this, be sure that you’re bringing lots of electrolyte drinks and mixes on the road with the team. Available in pre-made or powdered formats, these electrolyte drinks can help your players re-charge and avoid dehydration during intense play. For easy availability and quick fuel-ups, keep electrolyte drinks readily available in BPA-free customized sports bottles. These offer you extra safety on those warm and sunny days.
- Nuts, snack mixes, and popcorn. Ideal for a quick refuel during intense play or for recovery between games, nuts, snack mixes, and popcorn are light yet healthful snacks that provide important nutrients to your players. Unfortunately, they tend to spill everywhere if kept in their original containers. To keep these snacks clean and contained, dish out servings into reusable plastic stadium cups and keep them where your team can find them. Ideal for the sidelines or the team bus, these reusable and washable cups are the perfect on-the-go receptacle for all of your team’s favorite snacks.
Snacking Done Right
When it comes to getting the best possible performance out of your team, snacking correctly is essential. Unfortunately, many coaches have a difficult time figuring out which snacks are feasible to bring on the road and which will travel best with their team. These tasty, simple snack ideas are perfect for keeping a hard-working team fueled up and happy during intense play, and won’t spoil, make a mess, or spill with the help of a few simple containers, lunch boxes, and bottles to contain them and make them more accessible to your players.
