Noah Maddox
UNIONVILLE, Tenn. – With the announcement of Glenn Tidwell becoming Community’s new Head Football Coach on Monday, December 9, Tidwell is set to replace Chris Grooms following the Vikings winless 2024 campaign.
Tidwell, who took the past year off from coaching, was most recently the defensive coordinator at Cascade under then head coach, Jake Tyre, from 2021-2023. Tidwell has 22 years of coaching experience in total. Before that, he served as the defensive coordinator at Shelbyville Central under now-Forrest head coach, Justin Palmer, and was coaching in Virginia before moving back down to Middle Tennessee.
“I coached for a number of years up in Virginia as an assistant, DC, and a head coach before coming down here as the defensive coordinator for Coach Palmer at Shelbyville Central for a couple of years, and then of course the three years with Coach Tyre,” says Tidwell.
Now, Tidwell is diving headfirst back into coaching, this time as the head coach in Unionville at Community High School following the Vikings’ 0-10 season last year.
“You never lose the itch to coach,” he says. “Taking the year off to recharge the batteries, and being in Bedford County, you hear about Community and Cascade and Shelbyville Central all the time. I’ve got some familiarity with some of the kids there, and I know there is talent there.”
“It’s kind of like it’s a blank slate, and we get to build things from the ground up. Starting over, so to speak, where you can do it the way you want to do it, and that’s what was really attractive about it.”
Tidwell cut his teeth starting in 1999 after graduating from the University of Alabama in December of 1998 when he landed a job in Virginia at Warwick High School one year after Tidewater legend, Michael Vick, graduated and went on to play at Virginia Tech for the legendary Frank Beamer. Instead, he coached Vick’s younger brother, Marcus, at Warwick before moving on to another opportunity.
However, Tidwell says he didn’t initially even want to go into coaching while attending Alabama.
“I never wanted to go into coaching. I mean, I loved football, but I wanted to go into the FBI,” he remarks. “Back in the 90s we didn’t have all this social media stuff, so you would have all these football players from around the country that for some reason couldn’t pass the SAT or ACT, depending on the state they were from. That made me think maybe I need to go into teaching and coaching because I’ve been part of this system here and I can help show them the path to get to where they want to go.”
Usually, the path for coaches is coaching first and teaching second, but for Tidwell, it was the opposite. Fast-forward 25 years, and he is getting set to begin his 23rd season coaching football, completing the Bedford County trifecta at Community. He recognizes the challenging past of the Vikings program – Community has not won more than three games since going 4-6 in 2017 – but following an introductory meeting last week, he is focused on building the program from the ground up the right way.
“We had a player-parent meeting last week – kind of a meet and greet type deal – and the word that I told them was ‘focus,’” says Tidwell. “We are just going to focus on getting better in the weight room and getting better at fundamentals and doing things they may not have been used to doing. Once we get ready for summer and fall practice, we’ll switch to whatever the topic is that we’re going to go with for the season, but for right now, we’re focused on getting better in the weight room and getting stronger because I think that’s a need they need to have.”
Community competes in Class 3-A for football with schools the size of Giles County and Watertown in the Vikings’ region last season. Watertown’s enrollment of 681 students and Giles County’s enrollment of 713 students vastly outnumber the 577 students that attend Community in 2024-25, and this puts even more pressure on the football program to maximize the weight room as much as possible.
At the moment, Tidwell is splitting time at Cascade and Community until March when he will transfer over to Community full-time. In the meantime, he is busy putting together a tentative staff and schedule to try and begin building the foundation. As such, his focus on expectations in the win/loss column aren’t necessarily at the forefront of his mind with the seasons little over eight months away.
“Of course, as a coach, you’re wanting to win more than one game, win more than two games, but I mean it’s hard to put expectations on. Like everyone wants to win their region championship and everybody wants to win the state championship,” Tidwell says. “I think, with the program, it’s been where it’s at for so long that you need to find little wins and build off those until you get to where you want to be.”
“On the staff, it’s kind of a wait and see for some of those guys,” he says. “The biggest thing [between now and August] is just the weight room. We’ll start conditioning and looking at installing offense and defense. Basically, I’m going into it and we’re going to act and go off the assumption like they don’t know anything and just start from scratch just so we know for sure that they do know what we’re talking about. Right now, we don’t know what they don’t know, so we’re just going to treat it as a whole new learning experience.”
A whole new experience that will also include the team’s playstyle looking a tad different out on the field as well. Last season, Community leaned on sophomore quarterback, Nyles Barnett, to distribute the ball out wide to some talented skill guys, including Charlie Haskins, highlighted by nearly 50 pass attempts in their shootout loss, 49-34, in the “Battle of Bedford” at Cascade.
“As far as offense, we’re going to run the ball,” Tidwell emphasized. “I just think we need to be a team that also runs the clock as much as we can to, in part, try to keep scores down on teams that maybe have better personnel than we do right now, so we’re going to have more of a Wing-T/Option look to us. On defense, our base will be a 3-5-3, but we will be able to be real multiple out of that look.”
In addition to the on-field improvements, Tidwell will be pushing for off-the-field improvements just as hard in preparation for next season.
“We are currently in the process of trying to upgrade the facilities, and anyone in the Unionville community that wants to be involved in that would be greatly welcomed,” Tidwell explains. “We are in the early stages of trying to figure out a field house. The goal is to have a place for the guys to go because Community is the only school of the three main high schools that is lacking that. That’s really the biggest thing, just trying to upgrade some things and show the community that we are going to be serious about playing football and we are going to try and have the best things for the kids and go from there.”
Tidwell also addresses the need for a booster club, an entity that he is currently working on even as the Christmas break gets closer and closer with each passing day, and he encourages anyone and everyone that is associated with Community football or interested in helping out in any way to reach out and contact him or the school.
“We are looking to have the booster club up and running in the next two months or so, and if anyone wants to help out with that, they can either call the school, or email me at ‘tidwellg@bedfordk12tn.net’.”
Tidwell is looking to build up the Community Vikings’ football program from the foundation up, and he wants the fans to be able to be proud of the product on the field next fall. For now, winter workouts and offseason conditioning are the name of the game, so as he prepares for the long but hectic offseason leading up to the season opener in August, he understands that it will be a long but rewarding process.