Professional soccer is more popular than ever in the United States. Crown Legacy FC, the reserve team of Charlotte FC, is one of the clubs at the front of this exciting pioneer era for the sport. Based in Matthews, North Carolina, the team competed in the MLS NEXT Pro league for the first time in 2023. It was a season to remember. After winning 17 games and placing first in the Eastern Conference, Crown Legacy FC immediately secured a place in the conference semifinals.

So many factors go into creating a winning team — and the right food is one of them. A carefully planned diet rich in complex carbohydrates and lean protein is known to increase energy levels, delay fatigue, promote muscle growth, and repair after intense exercise.

Katie Best knows it best. As the sports dietitian for Crown Legacy FC and Charlotte FC’s academy teams , it’s her job to plan and source highly nutritious meals for her players. She excels at creating menus that promote peak athletic performance. But finding and ordering food for her ambitious soccer teams can be a challenge.

Feeding up to 40 hungry teammates twice a day

Every day, Katie Best feeds 25 ravenous soccer players and 10 to 15 staff members a pre- and post-training meal. She creates menus adapted to each player’s individual nutritional needs, looks for restaurants and caterers near their training facility, and arranges the deliveries.

All in all, she spends 10 to 15 hours per week (roughly a third of her week) handling all the logistics.

During tournaments, her job is even more demanding. Fueling the players for success is more important than ever, so she feeds all the athletes and staff five to six meals a day.

All the food Best serves has to meet three very important requirements: it has to be healthy (to boost athletes’ performance), top quality, and varied (so players don’t get bored). Striking the right balance can be hard, especially when there are so many technical hurdles along the way.

ezCater is the team’s meal keeper

Katie Best doesn’t have to make tough calls when it comes to food. Thanks to ezCater, ordering is easier (and quicker) than ever. By not dealing with time-consuming logistics, Best can spend more time counseling and educating athletes — all while knowing her team will still get high-quality nutritious meals that meet their needs.

No more extra time

The ezCater platform allows Best to see only the restaurants and caterers who can fulfill large orders in her area. She can also easily filter to find the ones with the nutritionally dense options her team craves. Because all the menus are available on the platform, placing an order takes just a few clicks.

Coordinating food deliveries is a breeze now, too. All Best has to do is provide an address and choose a time and date for drop-off. No more calling or sending emails each time her team needs food.

All this has freed up extra time on her busy schedule.

“ezCater lets me be an actual sports dietitian,” says Best. “It allows me to delegate almost all the logistical pieces of coordinating meals so that I can really just focus on the nutritional piece of writing the menus and making sure that athletes get what they need to perform.”

Finding food that’s nutritious and delicious

There are a lot of restaurants and caterers in the Matthews-Charlotte area, but not all of them have what it takes to feed a high-performing team. Best looks for places that offer high-quality lean sources of protein, complex carbohydrates, and fresh fruit and vegetables. With ezCater, she can narrow down her search with a few clicks and save hours scrolling through menus that don’t meet her needs.

Balancing budget with ease

Best orders for different academy teams, each with different meal budgets. She regularly uses filters to remove the most expensive items from her search, so she can focus on high-quality menus within her budget.

When she’s done adding meals to the cart, she can see the cost-per-person breakdown at the bottom of the page and make whatever adjustments are required. No need to make any manual calculations — or worry about accidentally overspending.

Keeping things on time, every time

Crown Legacy FC travels regularly for games, but Best stays behind. Because she isn’t on the road to solve problems, reliability and on-time delivery are especially important. She needs to have the confidence that her food will get to the players without any hiccups.

Before using ezCater, Best had to hope everything would work out — or have to somehow troubleshoot from far away. But now, she has someone in her corner.

ezCater does the heavy lifting of communicating with restaurants and caterers, checking on orders, and problem-solving when something goes wrong. She trusts that the food for her traveling athletes will arrive as scheduled without her needing to be present.

Why ezCater just works better

Ninety percent of the meals Crown Legacy FC players and staff eat come from TreeTop Catering and Events in Matthews, North Carolina. It’s their go-to eatery because it offers such high-quality ingredients. Best knows she could order the crab cakes, blackened salmon, and grilled shrimp her team loves directly from TreeTop. Yet she chooses to order TreeTop from ezCater because it streamlines her weekly orders and saves so much time.

For starters, the ordering process would take longer and be more complicated. Instead of selecting the food she wants with a few clicks, Best would have to email or call the caterer to place an order. With ezCater, there’s no need to pick up the phone.

If she ordered directly, she wouldn’t be able to see her order history at a glance. If she wanted to double-check that all the meals for the week were ordered, she’d have to dig through several email threads. With ezCater, Best can see her past and scheduled orders at a glance.

And, of course, she would be on her own to solve problems without ezCater.

“With the volume of meals we have, something will inevitably go wrong from time to time,” Best says. “So it’s nice to have someone else in my corner to not only help deal with issues while they’re happening, but also to make sure they’re corrected.”

Prioritizing quality nutrition without the stress

At the end of the day, feeding hungry professional athletes is a team effort. Planning menus, placing bulk orders, and coordinating deliveries quickly become too stressful for just one person. Why do it alone?

Best doesn’t. Once she used ezCater to order food for her teams, she was able to dedicate herself to other important job responsibilities.

“I stick to writing the menus, which is what I view as a true sports- dietitian task, versus handling the logistics and scheduling with restaurants,” Best told ezCater.

The athletic departments of the San Francisco Giants and Jacksonville State University also trust ezCater to feed their teams. Why not join their ranks and let us provide balanced meals to your players? Find out how ezCater’s sports solutions can make the assist your team needs to score big.