Nick Piccone
Former Flyer Riley Cote was a sort of cult favorite among Flyers fans during his playing days. The guy wasn’t afraid to drop the gloves, but he rarely scored goals. He retired at the young age of 28 and, now 34, is an assistant coach with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms.
But that’s not all Cote does. He began the Hemp Heals Foundation, and you can visit their website here. According to the website, the foundation “supports sustainable agriculture, sustainable health and clean natural medicine, while focusing on a holistic approach to optimum health.”
The whole message is about keeping the body nourished with plant-based whole foods and clean farming and agricultural practices.
On July 22nd, Cote’s foundation will host a music festival at Penn’s Landing. We’ll have more information as it comes out later this month and next month.
Cote explained to PhillyVoice how creating this foundation shaped the message he wants to send to people now. It’s a great read. Here’s just an excerpt of his Q&A he had with the site:
Riley Cote: I guess I was at a point in my life where I had, I guess you would call it, an awakening. It was basically right after I retired. My physical body was breaking down. Mentally, I was at a crossroads in my life of being able to continue a sport I’ve been playing my whole life or, you know, hang ‘em up and move on with my life and make a transition career-wise. Because my physical body couldn’t really do it anymore.
But I was also on a journey of health and always trying to get that edge as an athlete and changing from different proteins and supplements. And I was doing different reading and transitioning from more of an animal protein type of diet — whey proteins, a lot of animal proteins, a lot of meat — to more of a plant-based lifestyle. And it wound up coming back to hemp protein. Being one of the most digestible proteins — filled with Omega-3 fatty acids, fiber, chlorophyll — everything about that made sense.
And I already knew about recreational cannabis; I already knew about medical cannabis. Growing up, you see stuff like hemp fibers. But as you learn something like this, it forces you to put your head down different rabbit holes and the next thing you know you’re finding out that industrial hemp is naturally high in CBD (Cannabidiol) oil that has medical properties or that Henry Ford built a car out of hemp that ran on hemp. And everything about it just made sense.
You know, for me, I did all kinds of charity work growing up and in juniors, all the way up to the pro level. And a lot of times, you use your hard-earned money or hard-earned time and your just handing over this money and you’re not really seeing any change with cancer research or M.S. research — you know, my sister has M.S. which is another reason why I got introduced to the holistic realm. I just felt like I was wasting my time, so I wanted to create my own version of charity, and it’s helping everyone. It’s not just taking one disease and isolating it. It’s introducing everyone to cannabis and showing them that cannabis, as a whole, whether it’s the clothes, the skin and body care, the food, the CBD — can help increase your quality of life. And on a bigger scale, it can help the environment and the economy.
And that’s the whole vision. It’s bigger than just hemp heals the body. It heals everything.