Katie Cool Builds Her Own Path

When Hurricane Florence destroyed Katie Cool’s home during her junior year of high school, her focus shifted overnight from homework and college plans to survival.

Eight years later, after earning her GED, building a career in professional pool, traveling internationally, and opening her own business at 19, Katie is graduating from Cape Fear Community College with her Associate in Arts. And this time, finishing school is her choice.

Everything Was Gone

Katie was a junior at Hoggard High School when Hurricane Florence hit Wilmington. Four feet of standing water filled her family’s home.

“It happened so fast in the middle of the night,” she said. “I was running upstairs trying to pack a bag. We were the lowest point in the neighborhood.”

Katie remembers standing outside in the street, drenched, holding what she could carry.

“Each of us had an animal on our shoulder,” she said. “I didn’t even really know what was happening until I was just standing there with a bag like, ‘Where are we going?'”

Katie evacuated to Raleigh before the highways shut down and was stuck there for nearly a month. When she came back, her family’s home was gone.

So she did what she felt she had to do. She worked.

“Before my house got destroyed, I already had a job,” she said. “I just doubled my hours and kept going.”

A Familiar Face in the Classroom

A few months later, still reeling from everything that had happened, Katie walked into a GED classroom at Cape Fear Community College.

What she didn’t expect was to see a familiar face.

The instructor was an old middle school teacher of Katie’s and immediately recognized her. She remembers him marching her straight to an office to advocate for her.

“I took the test a week or two later, and I got my GED. I was only a few months out of high school, so it was still really fresh for me.”

Katie immediately started taking college classes. But financially, it wasn’t sustainable.

She stepped away to work again. Tried to return. Then the pandemic hit.

“Once COVID happened, I needed a new plan,” she said. “I’ve been trying, and it’s just not working out.”

That’s when her life took a turn she never saw coming.

Building Something of Her Own

Katie had been working at a pool hall. So she started playing.

“And I decided, like a crazy 18-year-old girl does, to try to turn pro,” she said, laughing.

Katie began traveling across the country and internationally, competing in world championships and earning sponsors. She played on the Predator Pro Billiard Series tour, one of the first professional tours to host open events for women.

One sponsorship led to a connection with Premier Billiards, a national distributor. At 19, Katie walked into the CEO’s office with a PowerPoint explaining why they should help her open a pro shop.

Within months, Cool Billiards Pro Shop opened inside Breaktime Billiards, the largest pool hall in North Carolina.

“So much of what I accomplished was just perfect timing and people taking a chance on me,” she said.

Eventually, Katie began stepping away from competing and leaned fully into working in the industry.

At a tournament in Louisville, she struck up a conversation with someone from the Predator Pro Billiard Series team. They invited her to Las Vegas to interview players at the Men’s World Championship.

“It sounded terrifying,” Katie admitted. “I was a kid who didn’t even raise my hand in class.”

But she went.

“You can’t keep going if you keep saying no,” Katie said.

The event led to another. Then another. Katie eventually accepted a full-time role as social media and community manager with the company. Now she works remotely and travels internationally for events in places like Spain and France.

Still, something shifted during one of those events in Las Vegas.

Finishing What She Started

Katie found herself talking with members of the production crew, videographers, and photographers from a small town in France who now travel the world filming major events.

“I was like, what are you guys doing here? You don’t even play pool,” she said. “And they were like, ‘We don’t know anything about pool. We just love film. We went to school for it.'”

That stuck with her.

“I got really inspired by their story,” she said. “I was like, you know what? Maybe it’s time for me to go back to school.”

The week she got home, Katie re-enrolled at CFCC.

“I was on a mission to finish school,” she said.

Katie mainly took online classes. Between running her pro shop, working full-time for the Pro Billiard Series, and traveling frequently, it was the only way it would work.

Learning Differently This Time

Katie is 25 now. And this time, school feels different.

“My number one priority right now is getting a degree. It just means a lot to me at this stage of my life.”

Before Hurricane Florence, before pool, and before business ownership, Katie was a child who struggled to read.

“I didn’t fully learn how to read until the fourth grade,” she said. “I’m dyslexic.”

Katie moved around often growing up and remembers missing entire units of instruction between schools. She felt the gaps.

“I’ve always kind of known that if you didn’t follow the exact path of education, there were a lot of holes,” she said. “You were going to miss things.”

Now, she’s filling them.

Katie plans to transfer to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study linguistics. She hopes to find her place somewhere in education, possibly higher education, though she’s leaving room to discover what that looks like. Right now, she’s simply enjoying the process of learning again.

“I’m just having a lot of fun discovering what the possibilities are,” she said.