Texas Christian University junior Sofia Collins lost her father to suicide in 2018. She noted because of the grief, her family would often push talks about the tragic loss under the rug.
Her sister, Bella, brought the conversation to light in 2023 at the University of Alabama by joining others to organize a boxing match.
Alabama was then the first expansion for The Fight Against Suicide, a nonprofit started at the University of Georgia, that organizes the boxing events to raise funds for suicide prevention and research efforts.
That first expansion was a knockout, said David Edmiston, co-founder and director of The Fight Against Suicide.
And after Collins attended the last bout in Tuscaloosa, she knew she had to bring the fight to Cowtown.
“We need this at TCU,” Collins said.
Two major Texas universities — TCU and Southern Methodist University — are among the latest expansion for The Fight Against Suicide. This year, the nonprofit expanded its signature boxing events at eight schools and is putting on a bout in Texas for the first time.
The TCU event, which is led by students, is set for March 6 at Panther Island Pavilion. It includes eight fights over the course of the night, said Walter Frazer, a junior and a co-fundraising lead alongside Collins for the TCU branch of the nonprofit.
Check out TCU’s Fight Against Suicide website and Instagram for updated information. Tickets will be $60 and can be purchased online starting 5 p.m. Feb. 13.
The matches aren’t your generic amateur college brawls, Frazer said. All fighters are going through six weeks of boxing training and the fully sanctioned match-ups will be overseen by referees.
Proceeds will be distributed to suicide prevention work. Generally, the nonprofit funds local mental health and suicide prevention efforts, Edmiston said.
The TCU branch wants to raise $100,000 and sell 750 tickets at the first fight, Collins said. Already organizers have raised over $37,000 as of Feb. 12.
“All of it relates back to that central idea of how can we spread support and prevention?” Frazer said. “We’re doing just that by bringing people together and putting on this event.”
The start of the fight
Like Collins, The Fight Against Suicide was birthed out of a desire to do good after a personal tragedy.
Edmiston’s friend, Sam Asbury, died from suicide in February 2020.
In an effort to host a memorial for his friend, Edmiston wanted to do something different while doing some good. He decided a boxing event fundraising for mental health was a good way to bring college-aged adults, especially those in Greek Life, to the table and have a conversation.
“If we could throw a really great event, then we can backdoor the mental health (awareness),” Edmiston said.
The first Fight Against Suicide at the University of Georgia was rudimentary, but the success was undeniable. Edmiston said they sold 1,600 tickets that first year.
After making it a yearly occasion, the nonprofit became more organized as a subsidiary of the Sam Asbury Foundation, created by David Asbury in memory of his son.
That organization is also linked to the event. The nonprofit organizes QPR suicide training and a speaker series at campuses a week prior to the boxing event.
After expanding to other universities, including Auburn University and North Carolina State University, Asbury and Edmiston wanted to see the nonprofit enact change beyond raising funds.
“The Fight Against Suicide is great awareness. It’s bringing attention to this epidemic,” Asbury said. “But we don’t want it to stop there. We wanted to move into the preventative level.”
The nonprofit recently launched college chapters. Edmiston said the chapters host monthly events alongside the yearly boxing matches.
He stressed the value of having students who are trusted by peers lead anyone who is struggling to the proper resources for help. Using the funds generated by the boxing events helps create a system of trust within campuses, he said.
“What we see is that a lot of these students, after they come to our events, they start calling on our interns because they see them as the mental health resources,” Edmiston said. “So we’re going to take that money and equip them to be able to properly broker those conversations out to professionals.”
Edmiston said 53 other universities have expressed interest in bringing the nonprofit to their schools.
Cowtown collegiate support
Both Collins and Frazer also see the value in students leading the conversation. Recognizing that they are not the subject matter experts, they said college students sometimes trust each other more than professionals.
“It can be hard whenever you have someone, an adult, that you think, ‘Are they going to go to my parents?’” Collins said.
Mental health is a tough topic to talk about, Frazer added.
“Doing it through this event, it’s a way to bring everyone together and for people to enjoy their time while also bringing a tough subject to the light,” he said.
Collins and Frazer said they don’t currently have any plans of creating a permanent chapter of the nonprofit at TCU as event preparation has taken up a lot of time.
But they do plan on making sure the event stays a Horned Frog staple for a long time.
“Seven hundred and fifty tickets this year could hopefully turn into a couple thousand in the next 5-10 years,” Frazer said. “We could do it at a much bigger venue, and it could be something that really supports the whole community and not just the TCU community.”
Ismael M. Belkoura is the health reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at ismael.belkoura@fortworthreport.org.
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