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By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

MONTEVALLO – On Monday, April 29 at Demopolis High School following their area tournament loss to the Jemison Panthers, Montevallo softball coach Tena Niven walked out to home plate with a piece of the past on her head.

Knowing that her return season as a softball coach would be the final one of her 24-year career, she wore her late father Benny’s Montevallo Bulldogs hat all season.

The hat showed the passing of time, faded in some areas, dirty in others and sweat-marked around the brim. However, it still unmistakably bore vibrant shades of Montevallo blue and orange.

The man who gave Niven her love of sports and loved watching her coach softball would always tell her, “Leave it all on the field.” So she lived up to those words, kissing the hat and leaving it at home plate before walking off the field for the last time as a varsity coach.

While she fulfilled her father’s request in a literal sense with her hat, she walked into retirement after thousands of games across four sports knowing that she had truly left it all out on the field.

“When I went to talk to Mr. (David) Butts, I told him, ‘I love Montevallo High School with all my heart, but I just don’t think I have anything left in the tank to give it,’ and I can say that with a good feeling that we always tell our athletes, ‘Leave everything out there on the field, don’t hold anything back,’ and I think I truly have given everything that I possibly can to the school, to the students, to the community,” Niven said.

 

End of an era

Niven’s journey began in 2001 when she started teaching at Montevallo High School. She became an assistant girls basketball coach that year, and a year later, she took the head coaching role, which became her longest-tenured coaching position with the school. She led the program for 21 seasons from 2002 until 2023 when she made way for Kevin Smith.

However, it wouldn’t be the extent of her reach at MHS.

She also served as the head softball coach after taking over for Ronnie Holsenback, leading for five seasons across multiple stints. The most recent one saw her returning to the dugout just to coach the 2025 season.

It was Niven’s second head coaching role of the academic year as she finished her 15th and final season as the head volleyball coach in October. At one point, she served as the head coach for all three programs simultaneously.

Niven was also head boys soccer coach for three seasons, but it wasn’t her first time working with boys. She helped out with the football team early on, serving as a trainer, fixing equipment, keeping up with managers and calling in plays.

That paved the way for her to become the public address announcer, and she has served as the “Voice of the Bulldogs” for the better part of the last decade.

For Niven, she just naturally gravitated back to the playing field when she started her teaching career. As an MHS alum and former athlete in both high school and college, she didn’t know what a life without sports looked like, so she filled that hole with coaching and helped wherever she could.

“I love sports and that’s just what I wanted to do,” Niven said. “I love teaching, but in the afternoons, I’ve never really known what it was like to just go home after school, and when I was in high school, like I said, I played sports, and so I was used to going to practice, and in college, same thing, I’m used to going to practice, having to be somewhere.”

She proved to be a natural at coaching and became the winningest coach in MHS history.

As girls basketball coach, she won a program-record 362 games, racking up seven area titles, seven Sweet 16 appearances and two trips to the Elite Eight. That was headlined by a 2008 campaign where the Bulldogs finished with a 30-2 record.

On the volleyball court, Niven won 270 games and earned 10 area championships, three regional titles and secured two trips to the state tournament’s Elite Eight. Her best season came in 2007 with a 30-4 record.

She won 43 games as a softball coach, highlighted by an area title in 2013, and amassed 27 wins on the soccer pitch across three seasons. Niven also received the AHSAA’s Making a Difference Award for Class 4A in 2016.

Even with all of that success across more than a thousand games, Niven says that she doesn’t remember the numbers so much as the moments and memories behind them.

“As a head coach, I have 702 wins and lots of area championships, regional championships, Sweet 16’s, Elite Eights, but I told them, ‘I leave here I think the winningest coach in MHS history, but when I think back on the coaches that had the biggest influence on me here at Montevallo High School, it really doesn’t have anything to do with the wins, I can’t tell you what their records were,’” Niven said. “And that’s like I told my players other night when I finished my last game, I said, ‘You guys are not going to remember what my record is. You’re not going to remember what your record is. You’re going to remember the moments that we spent together, the fun that we had, some of the losses that we had, but you’re going to remember those kinds of things.’”

Niven’s involvement has only increased with age, and she showed few signs of slowing down. However, major life events off the field forced her to do just that.

Niven’s father died in 2022, and two years later, her mother passed away. What’s more, her house caught fire near the end of 2024, making for a tough combination of events in a short period of time.

Dealing with so much loss over the last three years while having to turn around and coach multiple sports took a toll on Niven and led her to call it a career at MHS.

“It’s just kind of three big things, just really kind of traumatic events that especially teaching and coaching so much that I didn’t really get a break from and so it’s really worn me out physically, mentally,” Niven said.

 

The next chapter

Naturally, Niven won’t disappear from her lifelong home completely. She said that she will continue as the “Voice of the Bulldogs” at football games as long as they’ll have her. She also wants to return to coaching rec ball, instilling fundamentals and character in the next generation.

If Niven had her way, she said she would likely be fine with just a year-long break. However, she acknowledged that’s not how teaching or athletics work, so that is why she is stepping back from varsity coaching for good.

“I enjoy doing that, working with the younger ones, so I’m still going to be involved in the community, but I just need a break,” Niven said. “If they just gave us little sabbaticals where we could take like a year here or there I might be alright, but yeah, it’s just been a lot, and I know I’m going to miss it, but I’m going to try to stay as involved as I possibly can around here still.”

As she reflected back on her career, Niven values the relationships that sports gave her more than anything, from her teammates, some of whom returned to MHS to watch her break the basketball wins record, to the players she coached.

In recent years, some of those latter relationships came full circle as the players who used to be kids on her team entrusted her to coach theirs. She looked to the faculty who were there when she arrived as those she tried to emulate in her own career.

“Even now, I’m beginning to actually coach some of the kids of my former players, which is kind of scary and just to be able to hopefully have that same impact on them that I did their parents,” Niven said. “I’m just trying to carry it down I guess from people like Mrs. Susie DeMent, coach Richard Gilliam. Those were big influences in my life and huge characters and people of personality, good character here at Montevallo High School that left a legacy and not that I could follow any of their footsteps by footsteps by any means. I’m just kind of in their shadows, but that’s what I strove to do is to kind of carry on that tradition.”

Niven has carried the torch from an older generation into a new generation of students at Montevallo. The past 24 years have seen Montevallo undergo a major shift in demographics with more families from lower-income backgrounds and various ethnicities moving to the area.

As a result, Niven said she has to concentrate on being more empathetic and listen to what her kids are going through off the field.

“It’s really been different,” Niven said. “Probably my first 10 years here, we had pretty much a middle class as majority here in the high school, and now, I think we’re like 80 percent free or reduced lunch, so most of our kids, that middle class is kind of gone. And so, you are dealing with a different state of circumstances that a lot of these kids come from whereas before I would be so hard-nosed and probably wouldn’t listen on anything, I have to really build even more of a relationship with these kids so that I can understand what they’re going through at home maybe and what their needs are because just the economic level of our kids has changed so much.”

While some of her former players and teammates say that she’s “gone soft” for ditching her yelling ways, she says that approach doesn’t work anymore.

However, Niven welcomed the challenge of adapting with the times. While many things have changed since she played sports and even when she started at MHS, she said kids still have the same needs and wants from their coaches as they did back in the day. It’s just a different way of packaging the same message of support.

“Kids are still the same,” Niven said. “They want coaches who care about the sport, who know about the sport, but overall, who care about them.”

Now with moving into rec ball, she sees herself as a supporting role for not only the next generation of athletes but the next generation of coaches at Montevallo who will eventually lead the kids at a varsity level.

The hunger to pour into the next generation hasn’t changed as Niven still has the same love and passion for Montevallo as she always has.

“I’ve got a great niece playing tee-ball and the coaches were like, ‘Come on out, you need to get out here,’ and I’ll be like, ‘I’ll be out there soon enough,’” Niven said. “With this next little generation, like I said, I hope to be involved with them and just get them ready to play ball for whoever is coaching here at MHS and I’ll support and be loyal to everybody here as long as I’m breathing.”

 

A lifelong home

It’s a loyalty and support that Niven has also felt in return from everyone in Montevallo. Niven has always lived in the Montevallo area and turned down multiple opportunities to leave.

That is not only because of the deep passion she has for her hometown and alma mater but the people who make the place special as well.

“I can’t thank the community, the school, especially all of my players, I mean, that’s what it’s all about,” Niven said. “You can’t have wins and stuff without really good players and players that are willing to work, and so I’m just proud of everything that my players accomplished and the relationships that we have and just people that they turned out to be.”

As Niven walks away from the sideline for the last time as the head coach of the Bulldogs, her legacy is set in stone as one of the most well-known and successful coaches in school history.

Despite her well-documented competitive nature though, she hopes the wins aren’t the only thing she is remembered for. She hopes her legacy centers on raising people of strong character who make a positive impact on society.

“I don’t know what impact that I’ve had. We will see,” Niven said. “My whole thing was that when I took the job here, I wanted the kids here at Montevallo High School to have the same positive experience that I did as a student-athlete at Montevallo High School and I wanted them to have coaches that first off cared about them.

“I love to win. I actually hate to lose more than I love to win. I’m sure you know people like that, but it was more making sure the kids were doing the right thing, about making sure the kids were doing the right thing, acting the right way, making good grades, having good character and that kind of stuff.”