Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.
Dr. Alice Atalanta, Ph.D. is an academic, an action & combat sports coach, and a military and law enforcement advocate—but first and foremost, she is an empowerment educator. Her multifaceted journey and the framework she has developed combine to help women, girls, and professionals achieve actionable growth through practical techniques and leadership.
“Snowboarding saved my life”
An Ohio native, Alice grew up an avid athlete and outdoorswoman. In the 1980s, as the middle child between two brothers being raised primarily by their mother, she acutely felt the limitations attached to being a girl at that time. Their Italian-American family stuck together through divorce and a catastrophic house fire. Through it all, she found solace in the female-dominated sport of field hockey, and what would become a consistent pattern of empowerment through athletics in her life took root.
As a First Year at the University of Virginia, a sexual assault by a trusted acquaintance became a tipping point in Alice’s life. Hiding out in her dorm room and battling waves of panic attacks, she knew she had reached a fork in the road where she could either lean into the pain or lean into growth. Choosing the latter, she set her sights on the sport of snowboarding, and by her fourth year of eligibility as a UVA athlete she had placed 3rd in the USCSA in boardercross and 7th in giant slalom, earning both USCSA All-American and Academic All-American honors.
“Snowboarding saved my life. Pushing my limits in training and competition, supported by a highly competitive and driven team that had become a family, I learned how to identify and target the specific areas where I needed to grow. It gave me the priceless ability to spot what was holding me back, and zero in on those challenges with boldness and laser focus.”
Learning to find empowerment
Through the challenges and successes of snowboarding, Alice began to experience genuine empowerment and uncover her central belief in authenticity, resilience, and embracing challenges along the way. Alice went on to pursue several degrees in language, philosophy, and literature, spending 12 years in higher education to ultimately earn a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.
After completing her degree, Alice chose to take a pause from her academic career to marry and have her two children, now ages 13 and 11. When the marriage ended in divorce, she was forced to look at the myth of the “perfect” traditional life she had envisioned. Believing that “there is opportunity in chaos,” and knowing that she would have to go back to work full time, she resolved that this work would need to be deeply meaningful if it had to mean giving up precious time with her children.
During this turbulent time, Alice sought healing the way she knew best: sports. She took up paddleboard racing and earned a spot as the top female racer in Northeast Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. At the same time, she began to study boxing, MMA, Krav Maga, and Combatives, discovering new freedom and passion in learning to fight and earning wins in the ring as a USA Boxing athlete.
Finding purpose in serving the Special Operations community
Searching for purposeful work that could accommodate her needs as a single mom, but adamant about her desire to serve meaningfully, Alice sought creative ways to become involved with supporting the military Special Operations community. One connection led to another until she had built a team including political leaders and former members of SEAL Team VI. Together, they would create a local fundraiser that generated over $70k for Special Operations charities.
This event would lead to a career at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, viral writing projects, multiple books, podcasts, combatives and self-defense training for women, fundraisers with NFL stars, high profile speaking engagements, and seminars with leading self-defense experts. Throughout this time, Alice became a top writer for the veteran publication Havok Journal, and a book she co-authored with an Army Ranger caught the attention of Super Bowl winning Rams coach Sean McVay, which he credited with helping his team to achieve success.
During this period, she spent five years immersed in the Special Forces community working with the Green Beret Foundation, and when she left, she founded her own company, SOFxLE, devoted to bringing resilience training based on lessons and resources from military special operations to benefit the law enforcement community from Ohio to the East Coast.
Shifting from a masculine definition of power
Despite having found success in the elite Special Operations world, something didn’t sit right. Watching her daughter grow into a preteen, Alice realized she had made a career of speaking behind the scenes for powerful men, having measured her success according to a masculine definition of power and strength. She began asking: what does a strong woman look like on her own terms?
From there, it became her mission to empower women and girls through helping them to develop a warrior mindset. Reengaging with her first love, field hockey, she became a certified USA Field Hockey coach and began coaching middle school and youth athletes. Stepping in to coach a team without a single win the previous season, under her leadership the team turned around to place at the top of their league, earning only 3 losses in her 3 years at the helm.
With a coaching strategy heavily influenced by the leadership and resilience principles of elite military units, the team’s ongoing successes have proven that the same principles and actionable strategies for empowerment apply from a 12-man team of Green Berets to an 11-girl team of field hockey players. In the off season, she has innovated a highly successful model for multiple “Female Athletes Huddle” groups to continue the team building and leadership education while uniting girls from various athletic disciplines.
The essential importance of humility and Alice’s path forward
As Alice has spent the past decade helping groups from elite military leaders to NFL players, police officers, and young women embody grit, resilience, and empowerment, she has now again expanded her focus. Her latest project, the Humility Gap theory, is set to change the game with regard to how we see the process of personal growth and the obstacles that stand in our way. Combining everything she has learned from practical experience and her academic background—connecting the value of resilience to the importance of empowerment, the role of the military community to the ways women can grow—Alice is changing the narrative as a high performance educator and illuminating new frontiers helping young women (and their mothers) find what it means to develop empowerment on a woman’s terms.
