The conversation surrounding mental health on college campuses and within athletic departments has never been louder. College athletics is full of awareness campaigns, themed games, T‑shirts, hashtags, and social media pushes. Most programs across the country have a Mental Health Week, every conference has a panel, and every school posts graphics about destigmatization.
Adding a voice to mental health challenges was not what Elijah Green had in mind when he established The Mind Over Muscle Foundation. His goal is the next step: turning well-intentioned noise into action.
“Everybody talks about mental health,” Green said in an interview with Inside Carolina. “You see the posters, the T‑shirts, the awareness campaigns. But I just don’t think there’s enough action. We’re not giving athletes the tools they need. We’re not making it accessible. We’re not teaching them how to take care of their minds.”
That gap between conversation and care prompted the former UNC running back to launch The Mind Over Muscle Foundation, a nonprofit built on the belief that mental health should be trained in the same manner as strength, speed, and footwork. The foundation partners with schools and athletic departments to integrate mental health techniques and access to sports psychologists into the daily schedules of team sports.
It’s a mission that correlates with what national data has shown for years. NCAA surveys indicate that more than 30 percent of student‑athletes feel overwhelmed, while nearly one in three elite performers experience symptoms of depression and anxiety. The American College Health Association reports that rates of depression and anxiety among college students have doubled in the past decade. Yet, according to the NCAA’s 2023 mental‑health benchmarking study, only 53 percent of Division I athletes say they know how to access mental‑health services on campus.
Green had firsthand experience with that data at a young age, back when he was a three-star running back prospect playing out of Blessed Trinity (Ga.) High School. Long before he arrived in Chapel Hill, he carried that mental burden, like many young athletes, hidden beneath the surface of athletic prowess. He was talented, driven, and outwardly confident, but inside, he wrestled with pressure to perform and constant expectations.
“I dealt with anxiety as a kid, but I didn’t know that’s what it was,” he said. “I just knew I felt pressure all the time. I felt like I had to be perfect. I felt like I couldn’t mess up. And I didn’t know how to talk about it.”
There’s an assumption among college sports fans that the athletes they often place on pedestals are impervious to the mental challenges that run rampant in everyday life. After all, they are physical specimens playing at the highest level of amateur sports, with everything seemingly working in their favor. From a student-athlete’s perspective, college athletics magnifies everything, from scrutiny and criticism to competition and playing time, to the internal dialogue that can turn into one’s worst enemy. At UNC, Green learned how to lift, run, study defenses, and push through pain. However, the mental equivalence was lacking.
“We learn day one how to do a power clean,” Green said. “We learn how to bench press, how to squat, how to run a drill. But we’re not taught to meditate. We’re not taught to journal our thoughts. We’re not taught to change how we talk to ourselves. And those things matter just as much.”
Sports psychologists have been harping on this aspect for decades. Mental performance coaches have described the mind as the last frontier in athlete development, an area where gains are most available and, at the same time, most neglected. The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee now requires mental health support for its athletes, while professional leagues have expanded their mental health staffing. At the college level, access remains inconsistent, and cultural buy‑in varies from program to program.
Green’s first season at UNC in 2020 coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, which was both jarring and isolating for college athletes. He put in the work on the practice field over the next two years to improve his skill set, but his efforts weren’t translating into success because of mental hurdles. In the spring of 2022, Green started working with a sports psychologist. The results were immediate. He moved up the depth chart during spring ball and was set to compete for playing time entering his redshirt sophomore season that fall.
And then tragedy struck. Bryce Pitts was a childhood friend. Their relationship began like so many do, born out of family ties that existed long before they were born. They grew up together. Bryce, being a diehard UNC fan, accompanied Green to Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte to watch the Tar Heels play South Carolina in the 2019 season opener. They bonded over sports and making music. In June 2022, Green and Pitts stayed up until 3 a.m. working on a song, determined to finish the tune before calling it a night.
That was the last time Green saw his best friend. Pitts died in a car crash on June 30. He was 22 years old.
“That loss broke me,” Green said. “It made me realize how much I had been carrying. It made me realize how much athletes carry. And it made me realize how little support we actually have.”
With training camp and another academic year set to start, Green bottled up his emotions and shifted them to the back burner of his mind, but the weight became unbearable. He didn’t want to attend class or play football. He just wanted to be alone in his room. Then the breakdown came, an outpouring to his roommates of everything that had built up in his mind and proved too difficult to carry.
Neither Green’s strength nor his speed was much use against the grief that landed on his shoulders. What he needed, and what many athletes need, was a space to process, breathe, and be human without feeling weak. He realized how few places like that existed.
“I didn’t want anyone else to feel like they had to go through that alone,” he said. “I didn’t want another athlete to feel like they had to hide what they were dealing with.”
That realization became the seed of The Mind Over Muscle Foundation. Mental health care is primarily reactive in nature, waiting for a crisis to signal support and care. Green’s intent is to provide mental health tools as accessible as a weight room and as normalized as static and dynamic stretching.
“I would love to see a head coach start a meeting with breathwork,” he said. “Let’s meditate for three minutes. Let’s write down what we’re dealing with. And let’s have that be encouraged by the staff, not something athletes have to figure out on their own.”
The foundation’s intent is to partner with schools to make that vision a reality, providing access to sports psychologists, mental performance coaches, and structured routines that can be woven into a team’s daily rhythm. It teaches athletes how to meditate, journal, regulate their emotions, change their self‑talk, and build resilience that isn’t rooted in denial.
It’s more necessary now than ever in the current era of college athletics, where student-athletes often transfer multiple times throughout their careers, thereby reducing the depth of the roots that provide legitimate connections. The NCAA’s Mental Health Best Practices report, which was updated in 2024, calls for “integrated, proactive mental‑health education” and “daily, normalized mental‑performance routines.” Green’s foundation is essentially building the applied version of that document.
“I love that we’re talking about mental health more,” he said. “But we’re not going to see real change until it’s immersed into our athletic culture — until it’s part of daily life, not something you talk about once a year and forget about.”
For Green, the foundation is a blueprint for a different kind of athletic culture, one where strength isn’t defined by silence and toughness isn’t measured by how much a student-athlete can suppress. It’s his envisioning of what would have served him best when his anxiety was just another defender on the field, and his grief was oftentimes debilitating.