For many high school athletes, playing their sport at a Division 1 school is the ultimate goal.

Competing for national championships, attending a university on an athletic scholarship (in some cases) and having access to top-tier facilities and resources, all while pursuing a sport you love seems like a dream, right?

The reality is, managing both an athletic and academic career is not always as glamorous as it may seem. Early mornings, daily training, and games or meets every weekend, means a tight school schedule and barely any time for outside activities or even a social life. Balancing the two roles is challenging enough on its own.

Imagine adding a third career on top of that all: being a full-time content creator.

Whether it is giving an inside look into the life of a D1 athlete, collaborating with other athletes or just filming videos for fun, these college athlete content creators are building a brand for themselves off the field and outside of the classroom.

They are navigating the triple life.

However, prior to summer of 2021, college athletes who were also creating content faced various obstacles regarding what they could and could not share and were making zero dollars from their content the way a typical creator would. In fact, many athletes had not begun to tap into this space due to some of these challenges.

But on July 1, 2021, everything changed for college athletes and their personal brands. As of July 1, college athletes at every level could now monetize their name, image and likeness, or NIL. From signing endorsement deals to social media sponsorships, this meant that all NCAA athletes could earn money off their own personas for the first time ever.

Now, social media has become one of, if not the most, powerful NIL tool for college athletes, where they were in the content creation space to begin with or just looking to dive in.

Continue down to get to know some of these college athlete content creators outside of their game stats and hear their career journeys and NIL experiences.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – It’s 6 a.m. at The Ohio State University. While most of his fellow Buckeyes are still asleep, Mitchell Pehlke, 22, senior attacker for the men’s lacrosse team, is already up and tackling the day head-on.

As a Division 1 NCAA athlete, balancing school and athletics can seem like a full-time job, and for Pehlke that certainly holds true. While the rest of his teammates are just beginning their student-athlete duties at noon practice, Pehlke has already finished an entire workday.

That is, as a full-time content creator.

Post practice, it is all school for Pehlke. After 3 p.m. class, he’s finishing school assignments and zoned in on the “student” part of student-athlete.

“I’m a current Divison 1 athlete while creating a business, so the day-to-day schedule is definitely stressful at times,” said Pehlke. “But the end goal of making great content and seeing the viewer or fan laugh warms my heart and makes it worth it in the end.”

Pehlke now balances the two passions, but from as early as he can remember, lacrosse has been a part of his life.

Following in the footsteps of his father, Kevin, who was a four-time All-American at the University of Virginia, Pehlke said he seemingly came out of the womb with a stick in his hand. In addition to lacrosse, he also played basketball in the winter and football in the fall growing up, but with his dad as his coach and his older brother, Jake, already playing lacrosse from a young age, too, the choice was obvious.

Starting from recreational lacrosse in his hometown Leesburg, Virginia, to playing travel at age 10 and eventually winning two Virginia state championships in high school in 2017 and 2019, it was always Mitchell Pehlke’s dream to play at the D1 level.

So, when recruiting season rolled around in summer of 2015, he was traveling each weekend to tournaments in Baltimore, Long Island and Philadelphia with his Fellowship of Christian Athletes team, the aim: to get seen by college coaches.

Pehlke ended up getting offers from three schools: Johns Hopkins, Ohio State and his father’s alma mater, UVA.

While UVA might have seemed like the natural choice, Pehlke said from the get-go, his father’s messaging was that it was his four years and he had to make the decision that was best for him, not what others thought he should do.

After visiting all three schools, Pehlke ultimately chose Ohio State because it had all the things he was looking for in a college: big school, great education, huge school spirit and great connections. As of Oct. 1, 2015, he was committed to play D1 lacrosse, not even having played a high school game yet.

“I’m glad I’m at Ohio State and I’ve truly never regretted the decision,” said Pehlke.

After visiting all three schools, Pehlke ultimately chose Ohio State because it had all the things he was looking for in a college: big school, great education, huge school spirit and great connections. As of Oct. 1, 2015, he was committed to play D1 lacrosse, not even having played a high school game yet.

With college locked in and high school lacrosse to now focus on, Pehlke’s mother, Jolynn, began pushing for him to start thinking about life after lacrosse. She would ask, what do you want to pursue after sports are over?

The answer: social media.

It wasn’t television that Pehlke chose to watch after school; it was YouTube. He grew up on his phone, watching YouTubers like Bf vs. Gf, the Shaytards and Roman Atwood.

Pehlke said while he found their content to be entertaining and fun, there was also something about the idea of recording your life, editing a video and posting it to share with other people that he found fascinating. But just starting high school, the fear of what other people would say or think held him back.

A few months into that freshman year and after a big push from his mom, Pehlke decided to start a YouTube channel. So now the question: what was his first video going to be?

At the time, haircut videos were going viral on YouTube, so Pehlke asked a friend if he could give him a haircut for his first video ever, and he agreed on the condition that he could give Pehlke a haircut, too. One weekend and two botched haircuts later, Pehlke posted his first video.

It went viral in his high school.

He has not looked back.

“I don’t think a lot of people realize that from 2016 until I got to Ohio State,” Pehlke said, “I was just a typical YouTuber who was posting content, selling merchandise and making money off of YouTube videos and merch.”

When he started at OSU, Pehlke was confronted with one of the biggest obstacles in his career: name, image and likeness. He could no longer make money off YouTube and had to stop selling merchandise.

By the time sophomore year came around, the NIL rules were still in the distance. Not only could he not make money as a college athlete, he also couldn’t talk in his videos about being a lacrosse player at Ohio State.

Media Day (Courtesy of Mitchell Pehlke)

In the summer of 2021, the rules for NIL came around. Though, it wasn’t so much about making money again, according to Pehlke, but more about having the creative freedom to film what he wanted to. In his view, to make good videos again.

Now, Pehlke posts weekly on YouTube and daily on TikTok and has been able to collaborate with other D1 student-athletes across the nation, Barstool Sports, the Premier Lacrosse League, the PGA Tour and more.

For Maddie Walsh, Director of Marketing and Athlete Engagement at Cavalier Futures, one of the best practices she advises her college athletes looking to build a social media presence and maximize their NIL is to focus on what is actually interesting to them.

“Start just by trusting that if it’s interesting to you, it’s probably interesting to someone else” she said. “Start with something organic like that and just the consistency. I think it’s better to post once a week for five weeks than five days in a row.”

By filming consistently and creating content that was interesting to him, Pehlke was able to gain a base following within a niche audience and later expand to other markets outside of lacrosse.

Pehlke now has over 57,000 subscribers on YouTube, over 95,000 followers on TikTok.

The downside of this success: trying to have some social life in college. Nearly impossible.

“I barely even have time to see my roommates and friends,” he said, “and that’s definitely been a challenge for me that I’m still learning to navigate.”

Pehlke said that at first, it was hard trying to explain why he couldn’t spend time with his friends and roommates but that they now understand his schedule and even help him film content occasionally.

Recently choosing to forgo his fifth year of eligibility, Pehlke said the next step for him is to pursue content creation full-time after graduating in May. Maybe in the cards: a move to New York City.

“The merchandise, the ads, the revenue and the relationships are not going to come unless there’s good content,” said Pehlke. “Continuing to make good videos and do what I’m passionate about has always been at the forefront and always will be.”

BERKELEY, Calif. – As the sun rises over Legends Aquatic Center at the University of California, Berkeley, a six-foot, six-inch figure stands above the calm water before diving into his last morning swim practice.

In his time at Cal, senior captain Kyle Millis has earned two NCAA championships, completed his undergraduate business degree and even became an established content creator.

Now, almost one-year post-graduation and retirement, Millis has started swimming again, still creating content and working a full-time job at Notion.

“I’m going to be swimming a little more, still creating content and working my full-time day job to support the dream and support the mission,” said Millis.

Unlike a lot of college swimmers, Millis did not start at a young age. In fact, he didn’t make the full switch to swimming until his sophomore year of high school.

It was basketball, that was his first love.

Despite his height, Millis soon realized during his freshman year of high school that the odds of him making it to the next level in basketball were slim and decided he needed to make a switch.

That year, Millis had done summer league swimming just as a way to meet people in his new neighborhood and as freshman year continued, he slowly started to see that swimming was potentially something he could take further.

With two older cousins who were college athletes laying the path to the NCAA, one at Cal and one at the University of Florida, Millis said that he always had the end goal of being a college athlete in the back of his mind.

In swim, the recruiting process really comes down to numbers.

“Swimming is cut and dry,” he said. “If you’re not fast, you’re not good enough to make it at the next level, which is tough.”

Millis’ height could only help him so much, so after working on improving his times and many exchanges with college coaches, he officially committed to Cal in September of 2017.

Kyle Millis with the NCAA Championship Trophy in 2022 (Courtesy of Kyle Millis)

In his freshman season, he was part of the NCAA championship team. Millis would also eventually come full circle to close his collegiate career out with NCAA and Pac-12 championships in 2022 as a senior captain of the team.

For the first two years of his collegiate career, YouTube and content creation was not something he had necessarily set out to pursue, but was consuming a lot of content, mostly financial education-related videos, through the platform at the time.

Because of his interest in financial education, specifically for student athletes, Millis had also started a club called STAFE (Student Athlete Financial Education) to give student athletes at Berkeley the chance to learn more about the subject without the time commitment that most other consulting and finance clubs required.

While running the club, he worked to host seminars and webinars with experts in the business and finance world to teach other student athletes about how to manage their finances and eventually started posting clips from these events on YouTube.

Millis said he then noticed he was almost creating similar content to the channels he liked watching and started posting his own videos about athlete financial education.

However, he soon realized that not many people were interested in hearing a college student talk financial advice and knew he had to find another niche to start making content about.

Look no further than swimming.

In his junior year, Millis began creating content about swimming and his life as a student-athlete at Cal, but it wasn’t until November of his senior year that his channel started to pick up after he posted a day in the life video that went semi-viral.

Creating content and posting videos on YouTube for Millis now generates revenue on top of his regular day job, but when NIL came about his senior year of college, Millis said there was not as much money as there is now on that front most of his NIL experience came from advising teammates on how to market themselves or interact with brands.

With YouTube and content creation now in the mix, Millis’ schedule was even more jam packed than before, and any hours outside of school and swim were not being devoted to editing video content. He said a lot of the times, he was even editing while at the pool when he could.

Swim, school, edit content, eat, sleep and repeat.

“I honestly don’t know which one is harder,” he said. “I guess college was harder on my body, but my schedule now is more mentally taxing.”

Although he could’ve chosen to take a fifth year, Millis said that getting to “real world” was always important to him and he wanted to start working right away. However, the transition ended up being tougher than he expected because no one was no longer holding him accountable to wake up at 6:30 a.m. or get to practice or class on time.

From a creator perspective, Millis said that figuring his identity post college and D1 swimming, was challenging now that those clips he used to show in his videos would no longer be happening.

“I wanted to rebuild myself and remake myself into this new person, but I wasn’t,” he said. “I’m still the same person and I still have the same interests and I can’t fake that.”

After trying to move his brand away from swimming simultaneously as he moved on from the sport, he soon came to understand majority of his followers were part of the swim world and wanted to still see that kind of content from him.

He said that navigating the real world was tricky at first, but he believes he has found the right balance between his three roles to maintain a healthy mind, healthy relationships and remain passionate about what he does.

So, Millis is once again managing the triple life, just on a slightly different scale. His job in tech sales has replaced school, he is still producing weekly videos and is swimming again with the Olympic Club in San Francisco.

“I love creating content and I don’t foresee that stopping at the moment,” he said. “I can work a full-time job and have this side hobby, so to be able to do it and still be fun is why I have my nine to five job. I don’t think I’m going to walk away from that.”

CAPE GIRADEAU, Mo. – As the hometown girl, junior midfielder/defender Emma Brune is carrying on the family legacy at Southeast Missouri State University.

With her great-grandfather, grandfather and father all having played football at SEMO and her mother also a SEMO athlete having played basketball there, choosing to pursue a collegiate career in soccer at SEMO was naturally the right choice.

However, while she’s continuing the family tradition, Brune is making a new legacy for herself as a fitness content creator too.

“I want it to be a fun place and it’s so fun getting to connect with people on TikTok,” she said. “I really want to just show people what it’s like [being a D1 athlete] and help people along the way as much as I can.”

Although American football has been in her blood for generations, Brune followed the footsteps of her older sister Maddie who played soccer (or the other football)at Troy University in Alabama.

Having started at age three and only continuing to find her love for the game, she knew that she wanted to play soccer at the next level. So, starting her sophomore year of high school, Brune joined a larger club team in Saint Louis and began reaching out to college coaches to be seen.

Brune said looking back on her recruiting experience is just as daunting now as it was then because high school athletes have to determine where they want to go, in theory for the next four years of their lives, around age 16 nowadays.

Media Day (Courtesy of Emma Brune)

After about a year, Brune then committed to play soccer at SEMO in September of her junior year of high school.

Shortly after beginning her freshman year, Brune started her content creation journey.

Initially, she said she wanted to just document her life and memories on social media, but around the same time she had also changed her major to nutrition, which ultimately prompted the shift in her channels to focus on fitness and nutrition.

“I wanted to have a base on Instagram and TikTok where I could help people out with finding healthy recipes and also show people what it’s really like being a D1 college athlete,” said Brune.

For Brune, a typical day for her looks like waking up anytime between 5:30 and 6 a.m. and going to hit weights for about an hour before heading to class at 8 a.m. Then once class is finished at 10 a.m., Brune has practice and have a short break before either film, nutrition sessions or meetings with coaches.

Throughout the day, Brune said she’ll take footage of her routine or film any content she thinks of in the moment, and once she is home from everything soccer and school related, she’ll work on editing her content for Instagram and/or TikTok.

With such a busy schedule, Brune said it was definitely a challenge to navigate everything at first between school, soccer and content. The most important thing for her was also to make sure that content creation was not adding more stress to her life or taking over soccer in any way.

When she first started making content, Brune said there were several obstacles she ran into with the kind of content she could make and struggled because she had so many ideas and goals in mind.

“I had always wanted to make an E-book with workouts and recipes to help other people and share my knowledge, but compliance officers wouldn’t allow it because NIL was not a thing my freshman year.”

However now, with over 32,000 followers on TikTok and over 4,000 followers on Instagram and the ability to monetize her name, image and likeness, Brune is making a name for herself in the fitness and nutrition content creation community, especially because she is able to share the unique perspective of a college athlete.

Brune has since released a cookbook called “Everyone’s a Cook: Easy to Prepare Healthy Recipes for College Students” and even has partnered with a local restaurant called Fresh Healthy Cafe.

"Everyone's a Cook" book cover (Courtesy of Emma Brune)

She said another benefit that comes along with NIL, is the ability for college athletes in sports that aren’t always broadcasted on television or aren’t top of mind to gain greater visibility and create opportunities for building their own brands.

For Brune, the opportunities are endless, and she has several ideas of projects she wants to pursue in the future including her own app, and as far as content creation goes, she does not plan on stopping anytime soon.

This upcoming fall will be her final soccer season, but Brune plans on studying to become a registered dietitian and attend graduate school after finishing her undergraduate degree and said she knows it will be bittersweet but is excited for the next chapter of her life.

While her content might shift gears slightly as a result, one thing remains certain: Brune wants to use her platform to help others, especially fellow athletes, on their health and fitness journeys as that is her next passion in life.