Before Julia Cole was touring the world with her country albums, playing Stagecoach, or performing her breakout single on “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” she was a competitive volleyball player. While Cole went on to play at the collegiate level at Vanderbilt University, her roots were in Texas, playing for her high school team.
Now, her two worlds are colliding as she gets ready to perform at Spikes Under the Lights, a first-of-its-kind women’s college volleyball showcase taking over AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on Aug. 27. Volleyball players from Nebraska, Florida, Penn State, and Southern Methodist University will compete in a single-night tournament for a $1 million prize pool, billed by organizers as the largest ever awarded in women’s college sports.
The event will air live on TNT, truTV and HBO Max beginning at 8 p.m. ET.
For Cole, a former volleyball player who got her start singing the national anthem at her own games, the performance is more than another stop in what has already become a milestone year.
“It’s such a full-circle fulfillment for so many reasons,” Cole tells USA TODAY. “I got my start in music doing national anthems for my volleyball games. This is going to be such a cool environment to bring both worlds together.”
After spending her formative years playing competitive sports, Cole began singing the anthem at professional sporting events, including NFL games, and started learning about the music business along the way. Now, she’s accumulated more than 700 million streams and has nearly 3 million social media followers while touring internationally and opening for artists including Jelly Roll, Jon Pardi, Jordan Davis, and Dierks Bentley. In 2023, Cole released her debut album, “Country Sugar” and earlier this year, she dropped her next album, “Love You to Death.”
According to Cole, athletics gave her more than an entry point into music. The singer also credits volleyball with teaching her how to survive the career that followed.
“If it weren’t for sports, I probably wouldn’t have even become a country singer, which is what I do full time now and love from the bottom of my heart.” she says.
Sports prepared Cole for the pressure of country music
After singing at high school volleyball and basketball games, Cole landed an opportunity to perform the national anthem at a Houston Texans game in front of tens of thousands of people. She remembers her performance had to be precisely timed to a military flyover, so before she went onto the field, Cole and her father gathered in a stadium hallway with a stopwatch and he timed her until she got it just right.
“We literally treated it like training for a game or something,” Cole recalls.
When she walked onto the NFL field in front of a massive crowd, Cole wasn’t even nervous.
“I just looked around at the crowd and I was just like, ‘This is so cool,’” she says. “‘I’m so thankful to be here.’ I realized that the fact that I was able to do that and not lose air was probably something that set me apart.”
Years later, Cole still thinks her athletic background helps explain why she is comfortable walking onto much bigger stages.
“I 100% think it’s the reason why I’m having the success of my career,” she says. “I understand the camaraderie of having each other’s backs because of my background with my teammates, we call it the sisterhood, which is like my relationship with my fans and my songs.”
Athletics taught her “hard work, determination,” leadership, teamwork and how to perform under pressure, Cole says. And after facing game point with a gym full of people waiting to see whether her serve landed in bounds, performing music for a massive crowd can feel comparatively manageable.
“If you don’t make your serve when it’s game point, you’ve got an entire place upset with you,” she says. “The pressure of that, I think, is way harder than standing in front of 75,000 people and singing.”
The meaning of 'Sisterhood Country'
Cole calls her music “Sisterhood Country,” describing it as music that centers women’s experiences and relationships, including friendship, heartbreak, and empowerment, with the feeling of women supporting and rooting for one another.
The concept of sisterhood was already inescapable for Cole, who grew up the middle of three sisters, played team sports, and even joined a sorority. Now it’s also taken on a whole new meaning in her music career, not just as a theme in her music but also because she considers her fans, known collectively as the “Cole Team,” an extension of that same community.
“I know a lot about sisterhood,” she jokes.
That idea became particularly important on her latest album, “Love You to Death,” which was released in May.
The 14-track project grew largely out of Cole calling off her wedding and processing the heartbreak that followed, but she didn't want to make an album solely about “a break up.” She also wanted to write about the healing process she went through and the people in her corner who helped her get through it.
There’s “Daddy Daughter Dance,” about her father, and “At My Wedding,” a tribute to the women she knows will be there whenever she does eventually walk down the aisle. The album, Cole explains, became as much about the support surrounding heartbreak as heartbreak itself.
“The album is dedicated to the fact that this music is just like a sister,” she says. “If you need a shoulder to cry on, or something to scream at the top of your lungs, there's a song for you on this album.”
'Day Late & A Buck Short' helped change Julia Cole's career
If “Love You to Death” represents where Cole is emotionally, “Day Late & A Buck Short” helped propel her career somewhere new.
Cole released the song in 2025, after already building an audience through years of releasing music and touring, but she said this one connected differently. Performing it on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” back in May was an especially meaningful moment for Cole.
“I had had some songs that were doing well before that, but this one really did start to just take off,” she says. “It's the reason that I've now gotten to sing in arenas.”
The song's organic growth has helped expose millions of new listeners to the rest of her catalog, Cole says, and has helped create new opportunities. This year alone, the singer also made her Stagecoach debut, and has international performances lined up with headline dates overseas.
When asked whether 2026 feels like a breakthrough year, Cole doesn't hesitate. “100%,” she says. “It's mind blowing what one song can end up connecting with people and can do.”
Spikes Under the Lights puts women's volleyball on one of its biggest stages
Spikes Under the Lights will be the first women’s collegiate sporting event held at AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys. Nebraska will face Florida in one semifinal, while Penn State will play SMU in the other, and then the winners will meet in a championship, with the final match played in a best-of-three format.
For someone who grew up playing volleyball, Cole sees the scale of the event as evidence of just how dramatically the landscape around women’s sports has changed.
“If I had grown up having the opportunities that still exist now for women, my life could be very different,” she says.
Cole has long been interested in the relationship between women, athletics, and life beyond competition. She tells USA TODAY she used to helm an organization where she spoke with college and high school teams as well as women’s athletic departments about the skills sports can build.
The impact of Cole’s athletic background looms large in her own life and she says she wishes that more attention was paid to the women in entertainment and other industries whose athletic backgrounds helped shape them. Male celebrities’ relationships with sports are often made part of their public personas, Cole says. Fans see actors and musicians throwing footballs, playing basketball, or appearing in sports-themed music videos. She hopes the same curiosity is extended to women who grew up competing, too.
“We need to spread sports and the connection between other successful things, to give credit where it’s due, and talk about how molding and shaping our athletic careers were for helping us become who we are,” Cole says. “There’s an exceptionally high percentage of women in C-suites who were athletes. I think it's the mental toughness, the confidence, and the body positivity that encourages you to think, ‘I can belong.’”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Meet country music's rising star with roots in an unexpected place | Exclusive
