Born out of a boycott,
Atlanta Soul formed in 2018 as one of the first six semi-professional Ultimate teams entirely for women and gender expansive players. At that time, there were token women who played on semi-professional open teams, but their individual excellence did little to systemically empower or grow the sport for women and gender expansive people. Organizers and players saw this, and went to work creating the inaugural year of women's professional Ultimate in the United States. This coalition of teams went on to become the Premier Ultimate League. Today, Atlanta Soul's core values related to competition are Build Competitive Capacity & Mobilize Experience to Win.
Atlanta Soul originally chose our name because soul characterized concepts that we wanted to make up the team identity - passion, intensity, inspiration. We play a sport for the love of it and for very little pay, we organize and coach in our communities to grow the sport and empower others, and we grind to score in games even as the clock ticks down and we know we can't make up the point difference. As a collective, we take up the difficult work of being a semi-professional sports team with a social justice mission.
we're not only fighting for visibility and support of women and non-binary people who currently play Ultimate at a highly competitive level, but also for access and inclusion of people with race and class identities that are underrepresented in the sport.
This is work that we do for our souls - the work of committing to liberation and justice within the misogynist realm of sports, and the environment of racial capitalism, that bred the inequity present in the sport of Ultimate. We view this commitment as our way of staying true to the city we represent, a city synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement and where people continue today to bring about equity in the face of injustice.
The logo for Atlanta Soul is a winged broken heart. We created this logo as part of our 2023 rebrand that moved the organization toward more fully embodying both our competitive focus and our equity focus. The wings are a tribute to the iconic Atlanta symbol of a phoenix rising from the ashes. Present on the city seal, this phoenix represents the city's "resurgens" (Latin for "rising again") that began in 1865 when the city rebuilt after being burned to the ground in one of the last efforts to end the Civil War. The broken heart symbolizes the unity and soul that is present in parts of Atlanta as well as the hearts of the people working for social change in this city. On the whole, it expresses the aspiration for being part of a modern "resurgens" that puts these fractured pieces together to build an equitable city for all people.
Atlanta Soul Ownership
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