University of North Texas 
While conducting research on student athletes’ mental health in the 1990s, University of North Texas psychology professor Trent A. Petrie noticed a troubling trend: Many athletes — especially women — reported struggling with body image.
“These athletes spoke a lot about the concerns they had about their bodies and appearance. There was this consistent, predictive link between their body image and how they related to food and felt about themselves,” Petrie says.
Combining sport psychology and research on body image and eating disorders, he started developing a program that could help female athletes. By 2015, Petrie and project co-lead Dana Voelker, professor at West Virginia University, began piloting the Bodies in Motion program with support from a $20,000 NCAA grant. Less than a decade later, Bodies in Motion has been licensed to 25 different universities across the U.S. In summer 2024, UNT also wrapped a two-year, $400,000 grant from the Pac-12 Conference, which gave all its member institutions access to the program.
For Bodies in Motion, groups of four to eight female college athletes would meet weekly over five weeks for 1.5-hour sessions. Two facilitators — typically professionals in the athletics department — guide participants through activities and discussions which are intended to reframe female athletes’ perspectives around beauty, identity and self. Groups learn practices like self-kindness and dive into discussions about beauty as an evolving social construct. Petrie says the overarching goal is to help female athletes develop a compassionate relationship with their bodies.
“We knew if we could shift their focus from evaluating their bodies based on appearance to what they can do functionally, such as playing their sport at a high level, we’d see improvement in overall wellbeing,” he says.
“We knew if we could shift their focus from evaluating their bodies based on appearance to what they can do functionally, such as playing their sport at a high level, we’d see improvement in overall wellbeing.”
-Trent Petrie, psychology professor
Meredith Price, executive director of sports nutrition for University of Utah Athletics, has facilitated over 10 Bodies in Motion groups since 2019. She says the program’s progressive structure is key to its success.
“Each week of this program builds off the last, so you acquire new skills each week,” Price says. “A lot of the athletes who participate are still friends; they want to have follow-up sessions.”
As a research assistant for Bodies in Motion, UNT counseling psychology doctoral student Dafina Chisolm-Salau has seen the impact of the program. She has facilitated five program groups on the UNT campus and administered surveys.
“Some athletes are anxious about the program, but once we get started, they’re so excited to come. Rarely do they miss a session,” Chisolm-Salau says. “When they finish, they want to tell everyone about it.”
When Petrie and his team saw participants sharing their experiences outside the program, it moved them to build advocacy tools into the last session. “We ask them to think about how they’ll continue to apply Bodies in Motion lessons and skills in their lives,” Petrie says, “but we invite them to consider how they could bring positive changes to their teams, their athletic departments, their families, or even society at large.”