Something was wrong. He could sense it.

The feeling had been stalking him for months. The lights were off in his bedroom, and the darkness closed in on him.

Isaiah Renfro, a top freshman wide receiver at the University of Washington, was at his home in South Los Angeles. He had to leave in the morning for spring practice, which was about to start in Seattle. But he could tell: Another storm was coming, a gale of anxiety and depression.

He slammed his suitcase shut and stood near his bed, steeling for a struggle that he was never sure he could win. He breathed hard, and tried to stay on his feet. Now the tempest was upon him. All the pressure. The worries. Football. Family. The feeling that he could never measure up. He saw only one way out.

He went to the kitchen, careful not to wake his mother or little sister. From the refrigerator, he took a bottle of vodka. In a medicine cabinet, he found some Dilaudid, a powerful opioid painkiller he had used after an injury. He poured the pills into one hand. With the other he drank the vodka. He washed down one pill after another, pill after pill after pill.

He typed a note on his iPhone: “If I die before I wake, I pray to the Lord my momma straight, there is always food on my sister’s plate.”

Back in his bedroom, he lay his head against a pillow and waited.

“It is time,” he said to himself. “It is time to leave this world. It is time. It is time.”

Maybe you have never heard of Isaiah Renfro. He did not start at the University of Washington, nor did he play in the NFL. But you should know his struggle. There are scores like him, young athletes on college campuses grappling with mental illness — a crisis that is only now getting serious attention.

What experts know is this: Recent studies place suicide as the third leading cause of death for college athletes, behind motor vehicle accidents and medical issues.

And nearly 25 percent of college athletes who participated in a 2016 study led by researchers at Drexel University displayed signs of depressive symptoms.

Since that percentage is roughly in line with the general college population, the findings countered a long-held belief that athletes are less likely than their peers to become depressed — largely because they benefit from regular, emotion-lifting exercise.

As the stigma of mental illness has eased, the reporting of cases has increased. But experts also believe that young athletes now face more stress, which contributes to mental illness, than ever before.

“Performance and parental pressure, social media, more games on TV, more players who think they can go to the pros,” said Timothy Neal, director of athletic training education at Concordia University in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a nationally recognized expert on mental health and college sports.

The NCAA is playing catch-up.

“We are still so young in addressing this,” said Brian Hainline, a neurologist who in 2013 became the NCAA’s first chief medical officer. He cited increasing concern not only about depression, but also about bipolar, eating, anxiety and attention deficit disorders, as well as addiction. “Mental health is our single most important priority.”

A descent from the pinnacle

Bush Hamdan, Washington’s offensive coordinator, said he marveled at the sight of the young wide receiver sprinting across the field as a freshman. “Size, speed, physicality, he checked off all the boxes.”

He had been one of coach Chris Petersen’s first recruits, and the Huskies awarded him a full athletic scholarship. But from his initial moment on campus, in the summer of 2015, he did not feel right.

Part of the reason was the grueling slog of practice: the long hours, the intense workouts and the interminable team meetings — day after day, week after week. He had little time to gain a sense of his surroundings.

He nonetheless cast aside his growing anguish and melancholy and showed striking prowess for an 18-year-old. Instead of holding him out for a season, a common approach for freshmen so they can learn the rigors of major-college football, the coaches played him right away.

He had a breakout performance in a victory against Arizona. On his second catch, he broke three tackles and picked up 10 extra yards.

Winter approached. Isaiah joked and smiled to hide his darkening mood. He did not let on that while studying he often found himself sitting frozen in front of his laptop, his head spinning with so many thoughts he could not hold on to any of them.

Over the phone to his mother, his voice sounded flat and distant. It had been that way for too long, and she realized Isaiah’s problem had to be more than homesickness. Worried, she reached out to a sports psychologist in Washington’s athletic department.

Isaiah began meeting with her. He told her about his deepest emotions. Together, they focused on why he was playing football. Was he doing it for himself? Or because excelling on the gridiron was something others expected and wanted of him?

The therapy helped. He told his mother that the sessions were keeping his life from crumbling. What he did not tell her was that he had begun to have suicidal thoughts.

“My dad was a football coach first with me,” Isaiah would say when he tried to understand his anguish. “Anything he didn’t accomplish, he wanted me to accomplish. He played football and didn’t make it to the NFL, so my football was basically his life.”

At first, his father said, he did not want Isaiah to play tackle football. But after Isaiah said he wanted to make it to Division I football in college and then move to the pros, he supported his son with extra coaching and prodding, running his boy through drills and spending what little extra money he had on tutors to hone Isaiah’s skills.

“You’ve got to get some kind of pressure, some kind of push, if you want to play D-I football or pro football,” said Barry Renfro, who played at Miami of Ohio in the 1990s. “I had visions of me playing in the NFL. I didn’t make it to the Promised Land, but I know how to get there and I know what it takes. He got pushed to a degree, but it was hardly nothing tyrannical or nothing crazy.”

A dangerous point

Isaiah first tried to kill himself shortly after Christmas in 2015. He swallowed leftover pills that University of Washington Medical Center records show were Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication. They were not strong enough to do the job. He felt dizzy and sick to his stomach, but somehow, a few hours later, he trudged somberly off to practice. That day, he crossed a threshold that psychologists say is dangerous: Going from thinking about suicide to actually attempting it increased the chances that another, more lethal attempt would follow.

Isaiah soldiered through the Seattle winter.

In March, during a break, he went home to his mother’s house in Los Angeles. It was there that he drank the vodka, there that he swallowed the Dilaudid, there that he lay on his bed and told himself it was finally time to leave this world.

“It is time. It is time.”

But hours later, he woke up.

He wrote on his cellphone: “You’re alive.

“I’m not supposed to be here.”

He told no one what he had done. He still felt a duty to his team. He returned to Seattle, determined to endure. But there were signs he would not make it.

Rob Scheidegger, head trainer for the Huskies, noticed. “This wasn’t the happy-go-lucky-seeming kid who I had met earlier in the year.”

He decided to visit Isaiah in his dorm room. There was nothing on the walls. No photos. No posters. The curtains were closed. The room reminded Scheidegger of a cave.

Isaiah stood near the door. He moved and spoke slowly. Scheidegger told him to reach out to the athletic department psychologist.

He did.

But by dawn, another storm seized him.

“I need to go to the hospital,” he remembered telling the psychologist over the phone. “I need to go now.”

He was assigned a room in the psychiatric unit.

Doctors told him that the mental illness he struggled against was not his fault, that depression and anxiety had deep biological roots, which probably were affecting his brain chemistry.

He had long been able to keep his troubles from his coaches.

But by now Petersen knew. Through a spokesman, Petersen declined to be interviewed for this article, but several people said he had begun meeting regularly with his staff to discuss Isaiah and to make sure he was getting the help he needed.

What he thought of most was quitting college and football, for good.

Isaiah was back in Los Angeles with friends when he tweeted his decision. The tweet was from his heart and to the point.

A big part of surviving was Madison Bickel, whom he met when she came to Los Angeles on a visit from college in Portland, Oregon. Bright, ambitious and empathetic, she centered him.

But football, he had come to realize, was still deeply a part of him. He missed the camaraderie. Missed the competition.

What if he went back to the game?

He decided it would not be wise to return to the bright lights and the grind of a big-time program like Washington’s.

Maybe Portland State, which occasionally played the best-known colleges but was in a conference stocked with unheralded teams like the Southern Utah Thunderbirds. He loved the idea. He could join Madison. Maybe he could get back into the game he still loved, but with less stress.

A second, uneasy chance

Isaiah accepted a full scholarship. He started college in time for three weeks of spring practice in March.

I watched a lot of those practices. After two years off and all that he had gone through, he was not what he was at Washington, but there were flickers of it when he would acrobatically snatch the ball amid a thicket of defenders.

In August, weak and thin from a virus that had kept him from working out for nearly a month, he worked his way in once more with the team.

A few practices in, he strained a ligament in his knee and was forced to the sideline for days more.

He grew gloomy, convinced he was letting down his teammates, letting down the coaches who had given him a second chance. Saddled with growing despair, he began having trouble getting out of bed for morning treatments on his knee.

Bruce Barnum, the head coach at Portland State, noticed. He met with Isaiah in his office. “There is no pressure here,” Barnum recalled saying. “Even if you never play a snap for us, just having you here and seeing you graduate, seeing you keep learning about yourself, that’ll be enough.”

He made sure Isaiah connected with counselors. It was an important step. Since leaving Seattle, Isaiah had refused to visit a psychologist. He had insisted he was strong enough to forge past tough times with willpower and a daily antidepressant. Now he began seeing a therapist again.

“I’ll have to manage it for the rest of my life,” he said of his mental illness. “You see, it doesn’t just go away like most people think.” He paused and gathered his thoughts.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t live my life. It doesn’t mean I can’t go for my goals.”