Cat Albert is already a favorite on the MMA circuit for good reason.  Not only is Cat a well-trained, strategic and talented competitor but she is also beautiful and seemingly unscarred from her trips to the ring.  It would be easy to dismiss the athletic prowess of such an attractive woman but that would be a mistake.  Cat has dominated every sport she has been exposed to since she was a child.

There have been a handful of highly influential people in Cat’s life that have brought her to where she is today.  One of her early mentors was her PE coach in middle school, John Zatigan.  Cat later wrote her college entrance essay on Zatigan for which she earned an “A”.  Zatigan encouraged Cat in many athletic disciplines.  It seemed that there wasn’t a sport that had a long learning curve for her.  Whatever she tried may have been new on the first outing but with exposure, she would dominate the field.  Not only did this ability to excel exhibit itself in sports that would conventionally accept female competitors such as soccer, volleyball, dancing, swimming (setting a long standing record for the butterfly at age 10) and track (wiping out her older sister’s former track records) but she was the lone female wrestler on the Boulder County Fairview High School wrestling team.  Many of the opposing team coaches hoped she would tire of the grappling and disappear and others were so resentful of her presence that they wouldn’t shake her hand if she had a win over one of their team members. 

Such slights did not discourage the young Cat as she had strong encouragement from her very biggest fan, her mother.  Cat describes her mother as being a loud lady who may not have always understood the sport for which she was cheering on her daughter but always made sure that she was heard!  Cat’s mother died two years ago but the momentum she began, lives on.  Following her death and the relocation of her widowed father, Cat adopted her former wrestling coach, Jim Heun, as a surrogate father and grandfather to her 20 month old son, Brayden.  It was actually the pregnancy and birth of Brayden that brought Cat to her first Jiu Jitsu gym to get back into shape.  The rest is history – here was yet another sport to drive the competitive fever of this naturally talented athlete.

When asked how familiar Cat was with her upcoming BATTLEQUEST 8 opponent, Krystal Macatol, Cat revealed that she knew Krystal to be a “rambunctious kick-boxer”.  Cat’s last match-up ended in a loss so she made it very clear that come Friday night she was “head set on kicking some butt”.  In spite of the aggression that is sure to be present in the ring Friday night at BATTLEQUEST 8, it is an interesting dichotomy to simultaneously witness the soft nurturing side of Cat, mother of Brayden and Cat, significant-other to her partner, Mauricio Zingano.  As indicative of her name, Cat Albert has the complex skill set to shift from the purring persona of her domestic life to the alley cat seeking dominance once she enters the ring.  She is always entertaining and nearly always triumphant.  Friday will most certainly be no different.