CHICAGO _ The cup of yogurt looked, well, risky.
A minute earlier, one of the Blackhawks chefs had dropped some chia seeds _ which he described as a "superfood" _ into the yogurt and passed them around to the Hawks prospects standing in front of him. Some fruit was added to help with the taste.
Michal Teply took a nibble, then turned to Kirby Dach, who had also just downed his first taste.
"Do you like it?" Teply asked Dach.
Without answering, Dach shot back: "Do you?"
Looking at Dach, Teply shook his head with the disdain of a kid whose parents had just forced him to eat something new.
The other players in the group _ Brandon Hagel, Philipp Kurashev and Reese Johnson _ gobbled up the concoction without any problems.
"We don't ask you to go and buy every superfood at Whole Foods and incorporate it into your foods," one of the nutritionists told the players. "Start slow. The biggest part of this whole exercise is to expose you to some things that you can see that they're worth trying."
The Hawks had just begun an hourlong class at this week's development camp designed to teach the young players how to shop smarter, order wiser and eat healthier as they begin carving out careers in hockey.
Head athletic trainer Mike Gapski _ who created the program with the medical and training staff, led by Dr. Michael Terry, in conjunction with team nutritionist Julie Burns _ doesn't expect players to arrive knowing much about how to prepare their food. Many prospects are teenagers and never have lived alone.
"They're pretty green," Gapski said. "When Patrick Kane came in here, he was a pizza and cereal guy. But he didn't know. This is something new we just brought on a couple years ago because we want to teach these guys. It's development camp. It's not just a prospect camp anymore.
"It's meant to teach these guys how to live, how to be leaders, how to prepare themselves, how to prepare their foods and how to mentally prepare themselves for different things."
Gapski and his crew set up four stations in the kitchen area at Fifth Third Arena. Each session lasted 15 minutes and ended _ appropriately enough _ when "Chelsea Dagger" began blaring over the kitchen loudspeaker.
