CHAPEL HILL – Trevyon Green has always been big.

At one time, he was even too big to play football. Now, imagine that.

Too big for football!

“At the time, I really didn’t understand that was an extremely big weight, because all my people told me, ‘you’re big. You’re big, that’s how you are,’” Green said, referring back to when he was in high school. “And once I started understanding that’s not regular, I had to make a change.”

The change didn’t come about as part of a personal revelation by Green. He got a pretty strong nudge from someone whom he respected greatly.

“It all kind of started during Covid,” green recalled. “I was in high school and I was like 410 pounds. Yeah, I was big. I had realized that for me to go to college, Mack Brown had asked me to lose some weight. He was like, ‘we love you, but we want you to lose some weight and we’ll see down the line.’

“I was like, ‘that’s great.’ So, during Covid, all I did was run. I did cardio. The gyms were closed down, so I all did was three miles a day, a thousand jump-ups a day. I did everything I could to lose weight. I lost about 40 (pounds) there.”

The North Carolina coach and his staff liked Green a lot. They saw a ton of potential, but it wasn’t ever going to happen on the field unless Green literally changed his life. But how would that be communicated to the teenager?

Few topics are more sensitive to discuss with someone than their weight. But as a head coach who saw opportunity for Green past his facade, Brown used his decades of experience to articulate to the young man without being offensive.

“You’ve got to balance being honest, and at the same time being fair,” Brown said. “And he said, ‘can I get a scholarship?’ And I said, ‘not at this size, and here’s why: you need to get healthier to get a scholarship, and especially here. You move good enough, you’re smart, you compete, you wanna come here. But to do that, you’re going to have to show us that you can get your weight down.’”

Green took those words seriously, lost weight, and showed Brown and the staff he was worth the risk of bringing into the program. But the process for Green wasn’t over.

Once he arrived, a new set of challenges met him regarding weight, lifestyle, and football readiness.

“When I got to campus, everything changed. Eating got different,” said Green, whose weight fluctuates now in the mid-upper 350s. “Waking up early, my daily schedule just got different. I kind of had to learn how to properly nutrition my body for football. And I think that was the biggest thing.”

At first, the nutritionists wanted him in ketosis for a few months. Ketosis is when the body burns fat for energy instead of glucose, and is achieved when someone minimizes their carbohydrate intake to near zero.

Anyone in ketosis is going to lose a lot of weight quickly.

“As a football player, and even a lineman, that’s something you don’t want to do,” the Prince George, VA, native said. “And I understand through Amber (Rinestine), our (team) nutritionist, is that wasn’t the way.”

Replenishing when in ketosis is a great challenge, thus an athlete remaining in that state has more trouble sustaining necessary energy to properly compete. Green said it clearly hindered him on the field, but he thought it just meant he had to get stronger.

When Green realized he wasn’t eating right. Altering that meant he could properly replenish.

“It was light carbs here, I might go toa restaurant here and there, but it was nothing crazy.”

And here he is heading into UNC’s 2024 season as the starting right tackle. The weight and lifestyle frustrations behind him, he’s full adapted to the college game physically and fundamentally, Green is pleased with the progress.

When people say coaches are always responsible for what athletes develop into, they are missing a key ingredient: The athlete.

Green is self-made in so many respects, and he know is and is proud, even though for a while he wasn’t sure it would work out.

“First freshman year, they tell you you’re young, you’ve got to learn everything,” said Green. “Obviously, I didn’t want to hear that. I was like, ‘I want to play as fast as possible. But when understand there was a process I had to go through. And last year, when I had injured my (pectoralis muscle) and hurt my knee a little, and I felt like, ‘man, I can never take a step forward.’

“That’s when I felt like it was a roadblock that I couldn’t overcome, that I wasn’t going to overcome it. But evidently, I did.”

He most certainly did.