John Olive
Check the margins.
There, John Olive is diagramming his future.
Sure, it’s X’s and O’s, but the charted course is undeniable.
He will become a football coach. He will become a public educator. He will devote decades of his life to helping educate and mentor young people.
Olive will win more than 225 games as a Tennessee high school football head coach, culminating his run with a TSSAA State Championship. He will log more than four decades’ public service.
And, in 2025, he will be named the first TSSAA Distinguished Service Award winner for the 2025-26 academic year.
“I really thought I wanted to be the next Bear Bryant,” Olive said, hearkening to the legendary Alabama, Kentucky and Texas A&M coach who won national championships and garnered College Football Hall of Fame enshrinement. “My high school at that time, Maryville High, had very close connections to the Alabama coaching staff. They ran wishbone, we ran wishbone.
“There were a lot of close connections there; my high school staff would go down to every spring Alabama practice and clinic with them, trying to add in anything they added in. The wishbone was the hit offense of that time period and when I went back to clean out things at my parents’ house, I found a box of notebooks. Notes from science classes or U.S. History, but what you would see written in the margins, on top of the pages, will be Xs and Os. Everything in there was me trying to design a defense to stop the wishbone.”
A veteran head coach with stints atop his alma mater, Maryville, as well as a state championship tenure at Tullahoma, Olive – who played collegiately at Carson-Newman, where he also initiated his coaching career -- continues to serve as athletics director for Tullahoma City Schools – first starting as the high school’s athletics director and then expanding to oversee all schools in the system.
“I guess I still enjoy getting up every day, going to work and seeing young people,” said Olive, the son of a preacher who married the daughter of a preacher, Cherie. “I work primarily with coaches, but my office is located within the high school. I’m still around the young people.
“Someday I know I’ve gotta give it up and walk away from it, but I still feel good and still feel like we’re helping in making progress. We’re a member of A Better Way Athletics, and the progress we’ve made with our high school coaches through A Better Way Athletics, I’ve watched our coaches really mature and become so much better at how to handle students, how to handle parents, even how to handle communication with each other.”
After stepping away from his football duties following the 2021 TSSAA State Championship, Olive also relishes seeing Tullahoma’s broad athletics success.
Boys’ basketball and baseball have been major factors in state championships, and girls’ bowling also has been elite. It’s a fitting sunset for Olive, a 41-year coaching veteran with more than three decades’ work as a head coach.
TSSAA proudly salutes John Olive for his more than four decades of involvement in education-based athletics.
