Best Girls coaches - 2025-26

This is part of the Simmons superlatives - a recap of the top high school athletes in warren county chosen by Jeff Simmons.

Not to recycle my work too much, but when you’re talking about coaches, it’s generally the same across the board. So here’s what I wrote this morning when the Warren County Way story for the best boys coaches went up:

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I’ve always thought coaches are the hardest people to rank in sports.

Players are the ones getting the stats and creating the highlights. They’re the ones almost always getting the credit for success. And when records are broken, their names go up on the banners.

Coaches? They get the blame. And I think that’s how most of them would want it anyway. I’d be willing to bet 99 percent of all coaches live by the same creed: Players win, coaches lose.

The win-loss record will define them, even if it’s ultimately not what they’re there for. Most coaches, especially in Warren County, want to build culture. They want to show the Pioneer way (or the Bronco way), create belief in the young men they coach and have them understand that the best times in life are when you’re part of something bigger than yourself.

Usually when that happens, those athletes - or really, those teams - produce wins we’ll remember forever. And we’ll remember the kids for it - exactly like coaches want.

That said, I like giving the coaches a shoutout too.

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As usual, these were some of the toughest picks I have to make. And that’s coming from a guy who was voted coach of the year last year in Warren County (which, still to this day, was one of the craziest jokes ever and a reminder that many times any vote can turn into a popularity contest instead of delivering winners based on merit).

With so much success this year, I could’ve made this list 10 deep and I still think I probably would’ve left out some deserving leaders.

Anyway, on to the list:

Erin Blalock, WCHS volleyball

This may come as a bit of a surprise to some people. Blalock didn’t win a championship or pile up the most wins of any coach on this list, but she did something that I still hear people clamor about in Warren County a lot: Her Lady Pioneers competed with (and beat) some of the toughest teams in the Midstate.

I’ve long since given up on even trying to reason with people who ask, “Well, who did they beat?” when there are teams piling up wins in Warren County, leaning instead to just celebrate the success as it happens. After all, the majority of these teams have schedules largely dictated by their district, so your job is to beat who is in front of you.

For a large portion of Warren County teams, that no longer involves many matchups in Murfreesboro. The Lady Pioneers are also spared battles with the ‘Boro, but they get basically everybody around there plus more.

The district coach Blalock was able to guide Warren County to a top-3 finish in features Cookeville, LaVergne, Lebanon, Smyrna, Stewarts Creek, White County and Wilson Central. Of those, Cookeville and Lebanon - the roadblocks last fall to Warren County making it back to the region tournament - have been in the state tournament in this decade.

So if you’re the fan at home that thinks we should reward winning - and especially winning against high-quality, large programs - then I don’t think any coach did that better than coach Blalock.

She took a team that I think most people felt could be solid, but ultimately was probably a few years away from really making a run, and rolled up a winning season and did everything in her power to put the team in place to do special things.

I think that’s what we want from all of our coaches - the knowledge that they didn’t squander talent. For Blalock with the 2025 volleyball team, I think she maximized it.

Now, could I have swapped No. 1 and No. 2 on this list? Well, sure. But Blalock coaches flag football too. And something tells me tomorrow’s Best Team list may make everybody happy again.

Paul Willis Martin, WCHS flag football

Taking the team I coach out of the equation, I feel confident in saying that no team loves its coach like the Lady Pioneer flag football team loves Paul Willis Martin. That’s not to say other teams don’t enjoy their coaches - guys like Gooby Martin, Danny Fish, Todd Willmore (and countless others) are respected, revered and beloved too.

But the flag football team LOVES their coach. It’s obvious to anybody that gets to spend any amount of time with them at all.

And if that’s not enough to be on this list, then there’s also that whole thing where Warren County went 17-2 this season, was a step away from making it to the state tournament and has become a Top 10 program in Tennessee in just Year 2 of the sport locally.

Martin’s fingerprints are all over the success of this sport. He leapt at the chance to lead it from the moment it was announced, pushed all the right buttons on roster decisions, staff makeup and style of play and takes ownership of every misstep without ever accepting any praise for the success.

From my years of experience on the sideline covering sports, I can tell you that 99 percent of coaches are good guys. Or good gals. But Paul Willis Martin is a GREAT guy. He’s an ultimate role model for coaches wanting to break through and lead in the future, particularly when it comes to coaching female athletes.

Tim Page, Boyd basketball/flag football

You can take everything I just wrote about Paul Willis Martin and also apply it to Page, who - funny enough - is also a flag football coach now.

I’m not going to go too long on this because I’m too close to the situation to be unbiased, but I’ll say that Tim has gone above and beyond so many times for the Lady Broncos over the last six years of coaching. He’s a coach, a driver to games (and for food - the famous TimDash rewards for lunches), a travel planner, a father figure and most of all a leader.

And while he may not have been the first person to ask me to coach, he was the person who got me into the profession ultimately and still allows me to do it, even if some people may think he’s nuts for letting a crazy guy sit on the bench.

Success seems to follow Page wherever he goes in coaching. He’s up to 152 wins in six seasons in basketball - 26 coming last year, including an elusive NACA championship - and helped lead the first Lady Bronco flag football team to 10 wins in its inaugural campaign.

Kyle Turnham, WCHS basketball

As we established with Blalock - winning matters. And winning when you aren’t expected to matters even more.

I don’t think anybody was looking at the Lady Pioneer basketball team before last winter and thinking it would be the squad to post just the fourth winning season in 26 years, but that’s exactly what the group did. The wins almost tripled in just two years from when Turnham took over, going from five in 2023-24 to 14 victories in 2025-26.

And three of those came in a district that very few thought Warren County would have a chance to compete in, at least when it came to six games against the top three. When Cookeville shifted into the district this past school year, it meant Warren County would face three - yes, THREE - teams that were coming off a run to the state tournament the previous year.

There were the Cavaliers, perennial rival Coffee County and Lincoln County. The preseason assumption was the Lady Pioneers weren’t going to touch any of those teams, but may be able to battle it out for fourth with Shelbyville.

Well, it wasn’t a battle - the Lady Pioneers swept Shelbyville during the regular season and made sure to add some extra ground in the standings by soaring past the Lady Falcons on Senior Night. And it wasn’t like the upset was some fluke - Warren County was in striking distance against both Coffee County and Cookeville (which went on to play for the 4A state championship) at home too.

I got a chance to really sit and watch the Lady Pioneers for the first time Thursday in summer camps and you can tell Turnham has a good feel for his roster already. And they all seem to know what he expects from them too.

That’s when you know there’s a connection between coach and roster: The expectations are clear and the objectives are being met together.

Hannah Belew, WCHS tennis

With apologies to Gooby, Willmore, Josh Harris (who did get his flowers with boys wrestling), Chris Perry (who I never decided if co-ed soccer coach should be girls or boys centric?) and others, I doubled up on the Belew family with - dare I say - the more successful one of the household.

I don’t think Eric would argue with that - though he’ll get his chance for more wins in Year 2 like Hannah already got this spring with tennis. But think about it, after guiding the team to a runner-up finish in the regular season and district tournament this year (not to mention seeing her top doubles team win an individual district title), Belew has compiled a 22-3 record over two years.

For the math nerds out there, that means Belew has an 88 percent success rate so far in Warren County. If you’re scoring at home, that’s better than . . . I think everybody. Maybe Stan Jacobs has an argument with his 2-0 interim coach record back in the day.

Like all great coaches, Belew never makes it about her. Heck, you can barely get her to talk at all.

But when you do, you realize that her competitiveness burns as fiercely as any coach in the county and there’s a lot of that bleeding into the program she now leads. Her players are developing that same style - reserved and respectful off the court, but business-like and battlers when the ball is in play.

Good job to all these coaches! I think we’re close to wrapping this up, but make sure to go like and share your favorite Simmons Superlatives from the first week on the Warren County Way.