Duke runner Emily Cole to publish book 'The Players' Plate' using NIL

It was Nov. 2, 2018, the night before the University Interscholastic League State Cross Country Championship in Texas, when Duke cross country and track runner Emily Cole, then a senior at Klein High School outside of Houston, had a seizure and went into a coma for two days, she said.

Cole said she had recently given up playing volleyball and basketball, focusing instead on cross country and track. With a newfound focus on eating healthy, she found that even better eating habits led to even better times.

“I was eating super clean, drinking a bunch of water and long story short, I actually ended up drinking too much water,” Cole said in a recent interview with On3. “I was overhydrated the night before my state cross country meet, which I had worked so hard to qualify for. I went into a coma from being too low in sodium and that was when the tables kind of turned and I was like, ‘Woah, I’m technically doing everything by the books, sports nutrition-wise.

“‘Like I’m doing everything like everyone told me to and yet I’m in this life-threatening situation.'”

Cole’s medical scare, which followed a time when she believed her approach to nutrition was by the book, led her to write a book of her own, titled “The Players’ Plate.”

“The Players’ Plate” will be released in September and she’ll promote the book using her NIL.

Emily Cole interviewed athletes for each chapter

Cole interviewed numerous athletes for “The Players’ Plate,” each of whom has a chapter dedicated to their athletic and nutrition journeys.

“My mom has described it perfectly,” Cole said, “It was like, ‘When you want to write a book, it has to be something that is just bursting to come out of you.’ Like, I just wanted to talk about this to everyone.”

The athletes featured in the book include Marshall Kasowski, a relief pitcher in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ minor league system who has been a longtime family friend of the Coles.

Cole also interviewed Olympic gold medalist beach volleyball player April Ross. Ross once appeared in a commercial for Mizuno with Cole’s sister, Julia, a Nashville-based country music artist.

“I asked all these elite athletes, ‘How did you utilize sports nutrition to get to the top where you are now and what’s the biggest lesson you wished that you had known starting out?'” Emily Cole said. “I just thought this would be a great way to kind of teach these core sports nutrition concepts to the younger generation because they’re learning it from the athletes that they idolize and these athletes who have been through it and learned these lessons the hard way.

“So I gave each athlete their own chapter and kind of tell their life’s athletic journey and have one core sports nutrition concept to come from their story. It’s kind of like a ‘show rather than tell’ thing so that that way I’m not just like shoving sports nutrition facts down the reader’s throat.”

In her own athletic career, Cole was the ACC’s silver medalist in the 3,000-meter steeplechase in 2022.

A registered dietician approved the concepts

Each chapter ends with a recipe that allows readers to apply the nutritional concepts they learn.

Cole previously told On3 that aside from the small businesses for which she’s really passionate, such as ones that involve sports nutrition and running, she doesn’t accept products as compensation in NIL deals.

However, when she does, she reaches out to a registered dietician at Duke to make sure the products are safe and approved. Similarly, for “The Players’ Plate,” Cole said she had a registered dietician read each chapter to make sure the lessons are supported by an expert.

“I’m basically saying, ‘I’m not an expert,'” Cole said. “I’m just putting all this information from the experts into one location for other athletes to find that I gained from working with professionals as a position of a DI athlete.”

Emily Cole’s plans for the book

Cole said the book was a rare blessing from the COVID-19 pandemic. She was finishing her freshman year at Duke when the university sent students home. She took a gap semester in the fall of 2020.

Cole signed up for a program at Georgetown in which she said current college students can pay roughly $300 in order to partner with a publishing company while retaining ownership rights to their books.

“It’s definitely been a long process of writing for the past two years to get to this point but I couldn’t be more grateful for how the timing turned out,” she said, “because it ended up being perfect with the new NIL laws coming out. I did not anticipate that at all. I thought that whenever I started I wouldn’t be able to talk about my experience as a DI athlete… That’s an opportunity that I just never even thought of whenever I started writing the book. It wasn’t the goal.”

She’s taking full advantage of the NIL-related opportunities. The book’s cover is a picture of Cole in a running stance and she plans on going on a book tour, likely in the summer of 2023.

Emily Cole’s viral TikTok video

In November 2021, Cole’s social media following exploded thanks to a video she posted on TikTok. “Need a date for formal – send help pls and thank u,” she wrote in an on-screen caption.

An Ohio State lacrosse player named Mitchell Pehlke responded with a video of his own.

After the two talked on the phone and through FaceTime — they “trusted that neither one of us was crazy,” Cole said, laughing — he ended up driving to Duke to be Cole’s date.

“It’s crazy thinking about it because I remember whenever Mitchell had first responded,” Cole said. “I know a couple of my friends sent it to me. This is before it really blew up and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so funny. Haha.’ I didn’t really consider, like, it could actually happen and once it started getting bigger and the video hit a million streams and things like that, my friends were like, ‘Emily, you should actually take him. What is the downside? There is none.'”

While Cole said she has put a lot of work into building her personal brand, including the two-year process of writing “The Players’ Plate,” the viral TikTok interaction helped grow her audience, to whom she’ll now market her book. She now has roughly 167,000 followers on TikTok.

“It’s really crazy to me, thinking back to how I took that risk,” Cole said. “… I would definitely recommend to any athletes, whenever you have an opportunity like that come up where something blows up, take advantage of it because that’s something that I almost didn’t do and it ended up creating a lot of the momentum for the platform that I’ve been able to build since.”