Education and information studies lecturer Julie Pelikhova has taught student-athletes and coaches to prioritize their mental health for six years.
Pelikhova – who teaches for UCLA’s Transformative Coaching and Leadership master’s program – said her experience helping students succeed in their sports inspired her to write a book titled “Mindset Champion: Winning the Inner Game for Student Athletes.” The book promotes conversations about athletes’ mental health and addresses the stigma surrounding it, she added.
“I would continually hear athletes saying, ‘I wish I had this freshman year,’ ‘I wish I knew this earlier,’ ‘I wish my whole team can hear these things,’” Pelikhova said. “I tried to write articles and publish stuff, but I was like ‘No, I need to put it together like a book and a hard copy of something I can give to teams and coaches so that they have these tools.”
The book – formatted like a sports team’s playbook – consists of nine chapters with topics centered on feedback from athletes. Each chapter contains interactive activities, as well as anecdotes from professional athletes, she said.
Training one’s mindset is equally important as physical training, Pelikhova said, adding that her book serves as a guide for people to build resilience and self-assurance.
Pelikhova said she worked with graduate students to ensure the writing style was appropriate for college-age audiences, incorporating feedback about tone, content and anecdotes to feature in each chapter.
Brooklyn Moors, a graduate student and former member of the UCLA gymnastics team, said she wished she knew about the book’s strategies to prevent burnout when she was a student-athlete. Moors, a 2025 NCAA floor champion, added that she met Pelikhova through the TCL program, after which Pelikhova quickly became an influential mentor.
“I retired last April from gymnastics, and this book was important for me as I move into the next chapter of my life, because gymnastics has been my entire life,” Moors said. “It’s not just for student-athletes – it’s also for people after.”
Pelikhova said she witnessed student-athletes lose their sense of self after becoming physically inactive, taking a break because of injuries, as well as after the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences inspired Pelikhova to empower student-athletes and remind them of their importance as people outside their sport, she added.
The book is not only for college athletes, Pelikhova said, but for anyone who wants to rediscover themself beyond their field.
Moors said the book builds on the mental health strategies that Pelikhova presented in the TCL courses.
“Dr. Pelikhova’s message in the book is really special,” Moors said. “In a sport or in any area, sometimes the performance is prioritized and the human element and the mental part gets left out. But we’ve now come to learn that the mental part is actually just as important.”
Mariana De La Garza, a lecturer in the TCL program, said Pelikhova worked closely with student-athletes to incorporate their perspectives into the book. This collaboration allowed her to provide concrete tools for student-athletes to improve their mental health, which stands in contrast to other resources that only explain the problem instead of offering solutions, De La Garza said.
“It’s one thing to know this is happening, and it’s another to help validate the actual experience with a real account of other people going through it,” De La Garza said.
Pelikhova has taught several players on UCLA’s women’s basketball team – including Angela Dugalić, Gianna Kneepkens and Charlisse Leger-Walker – which De La Garza said believes helped the team secure its first-ever NCAA championship.
UCLA defeated the University of South Carolina 79-51 in early April to take home the title.
[Related: Fans flood Pauley Pavilion to celebrate UCLA women’s basketball’s first NCAA title]
Pelikhova said she hopes that her book helps student-athletes at other universities. She added that she plans to host customized workshops on specific tools from the book and implement mental health strategies with sports teams across UCLA and high schools.
“We are, for the first time in history, marrying the performance on the court with the person outside of the court,” De La Garza said. “I urge them (student-athletes), in the moments where they feel like they are just a number, a statistic, to remember that they are much more than their sport.”
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