‘What I wanted to do always:’ Valley AD Holland making new relationships close to home

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Sports have defined Alexa Holland’s life, and she has been everywhere to make it happen.

From the Super Bowl to the Kentucky Derby to a Division I college football team to state championship events in different sports all over the country, her experiences are vast and widespread.

But when the athletic director position at Tippecanoe Valley became open last fall, she understood it as an opportunity to head close to home and be near family.

“I obviously wanted to continue to work in sports, and so this was an opportunity to move home, and it’s still close enough to my community to where I felt like I could still be home,” Holland said. “And my sister (Rylee), she had kids, so it was a matter of time of just me coming home and doing what I wanted to do always.”

She was eventually hired Dec. 15 and is now in her first summer on the job of the school that was once her archrival. Holland is a 2016 Rochester grad who played three sports. A quick guard who could both score off the dribble and shoot the 3, she was a member of a regional championship basketball team that lost to Valley in the 2015 Class 3A semistate and another sectional championship team in 2016.

She was also the shortstop on the Rochester softball team – her coach was her mother Carla – and later played that sport at the Division I level at Ohio University.

There is some irony with that. Known more for her slap hitting and speed than her power, she hit her only career home run at – of all places – Valley in a 14-1 win on May 19, 2014.

And there is some irony on top of irony: Though she lost fewer than 20 games in four seasons at Rochester, she never won a sectional as a player. But in her first season as Valley AD, the Brian Barger-coached Lady Vikings won a sectional, and she got to witness it in person, including a 5-4 win over Columbia City in the semifinals in which Valley prevailed despite being down to their final out in the seventh inning and a 3-1 win over a Fairfield team that won 22 games to win the title.

“The very last game, I just remember seeing Dalynne Bussard, and she was just in the zone,” Holland said. “My dad came with me to watch the game, and I was sitting by principal Kresca, and it was just cool to watch. Everybody was in it. Our shortstop (KC Shriver) made some really great plays, and then our hitting just kind of aligned. So it was really cool to see, especially because I didn’t ever get a softball sectional while I was at Rochester. So being able to see it and hand over the championship trophy to our team, that was a really cool feeling.

“It was also cool because softball was my sport, so for the first sectional that we won, for me as an A.D., for it to be softball, that was pretty cool.”

‘It’s definitely more relationship-driven’

Though she said she is doing what she always wanted to do, Holland’s background was more in the business of sports than running an athletic department. She has a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University’s sports management program and an M.B.A. and a master’s in sports administration – it’s a dual master’s program – from there as well.

She said Ohio University’s sport management program was why she picked that school. Athens, Ohio is about 75 miles southeast of Columbus.

“I wanted to work in development,” Holland said. “So I was kind of between two things. I didn’t know if I wanted to work in the compliance world or development. Compliance, I worked with Xavier and their NIL collective, that kind of thing. I realized that I didn't necessarily want to get into that space. It just seemed at the time just unorganized and unsure of where it was going to go.”

She also worked on the NIL front with the athletic department at Yale – the school has a $1 billion dollar endowment – and said she was unsure if that was what she wanted.

Eventually, she said the CEO of Teall Properties Group (TPG) found out about her. The CEO was also an Ohio University grad, so he reached out to hire her. TPG defines itself as a “strategic marketing and sponsorship firm that connects brands with high school athletic programs and activity organizations.”

The announcements you hear over the public address system at high school state championship events are often products and brands that Holland’s company sold.

That job required much travel. While she was living where TPG was headquartered in Winston-Salem, N.C., she was traveling for work everywhere from Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine down to New Jersey and New York and Washington, D.C. and Virginia, moving to whatever state had a state championship event that weekend.

Then she moved to a bigger property in Dublin, Ohio. Then when her company got the Florida High School Athletic Association account, she moved again to Sarasota, Fla.

“I would say it was a bigger transition going from the sales and marketing side of the corporate partnership world to this,” Holland said. “It’s definitely more relationship-driven. But I mean, it’s been positive. There’s been a lot of support with our superintendent (Blaine Conley), my principal (Brandon Kresca) and just everybody else coach-wise.”

Early challenges at Valley

Getting hired in mid-December was challenging. She had to develop relationships with winter sports coaches on the fly. She also had to get right to work planning for a girls basketball sectional that Valley was hosting the first week in February.

She thanked Kresca and other athletic directors like NorthWood’s A.J. Risedorph and Rochester’s Cal Stone and assistant athletic director Greg Martz for their help.

“I was doing all these things that I have obviously never done as far as planning events,” Holland said. “But I feel like I’m still continuing to learn. Big transition, big learning curve.”

She was asked if many in the Valley community knew who she was when she was hired.

“I don’t necessarily know how many people knew who I was, but I would have some people come up to me at the games and just say, ‘Hey, glad you’re here,’” Holland said. “So not necessarily awkward. I think you can probably assume that a lot of people made jokes about ‘welcome to the good side of things.’ But that was about it. Not very many awkward interactions.”

As a senior at Rochester, she also said she had an internship with then-athletic director Ryan Helt.

“This was just a good opportunity to finally get that role with the athletic department,” Holland said.

Life as a college softball player

Holland played for two coaches at Ohio U. Jodi Hermanek – everybody called her Coach Herm – coached her for two years but then left for the University of Pittsburgh after her sophomore year. Kenzie Roark replaced her.

Ohio won the Mid-American Conference Tournament and qualified automatically for the NCAA Tournament during Holland’s sophomore season in 2018.

Life both on and off the field was strictly regimented, according to Holland.

“My coach ran that like a business,” Holland said. “We woke up, and we already had our schedules. But there were a lot of study tables. We had to have 10 hours of study tables. And then you had weights. … You had individual fielding, and then you would have individual hitting, and then you would have team practice. So we were on a pretty tight schedule as far as training-wise. I think if you just stay in your lane … and focus on you, then you win as a team. I think she helped us buy into that, so I think that helped us winning as a team.”

All along, she was juggling softball and school. She said she needed to accept every internship opportunity she could to build her resume, so she could gain entrance into the joint M.B.A./M.S.A. program.

“Oh gosh, how long do you have?” Holland quipped when asked what her internships were.

She had an internship with the Cleveland Browns, working with them as they transitioned from paper tickets to digital. She worked with the sports information director at Ohio University. She interned at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. She had the internships at Xavier and Yale. She had an internship at Wasserman Media Group, based out of Los Angeles. She interned at Super Bowl LVI in Inglewood, Calif., when the Rams beat the Bengals in February 2022. She interned at the Kentucky Derby. And her biggest internship was with the football team at Ohio University, which she did for three years.

Meanwhile, in March 2020, she was playing at a softball tournament in Florida when the coaches gathered the team after a game and told the players that the season was canceled due to the COVID pandemic.

Once sports returned, all players were offered another year of eligibility, but her M.B.A. classwork would not allow her to play softball at the same time. After getting both master’s degrees, she got the job at TPG.

Getting more multi-sport athletes

And now she’s working at Valley, where she not only can inhabit the perspective of the star athlete who goes on to play a Division I sports but also the perspective of the kid who is just trying out a sport. That’s because as a senior at Rochester, Holland came out for the soccer team as a senior, having not played the game before.

“If anything too, Valley, we’re probably one of the smallest 3A schools, so I really try to encourage multiple-sport athletes,” Holland said. “Because (girls basketball) coach Rebekah Parker and I have even talked, great basketball players make good soccer players. There’s so much that you could take away from another sport and add it to maybe your better sport. So I really try to push for multiple-sport athletes.”

She talks with her coaches about getting the most out of the weight room. 

She wants to see some non-revenue sports grow. The school built a new track at Smith-Bibler Memorial Stadium: Home of Death Valley Football. The team had all its practices at Rochester in the spring of 2025 and had no home meets, and numbers have been slow to rebound. (Holland noted that a successful girls tennis program, which upset Warsaw in the sectional semifinals, led by coach Zack Shambaugh that drew over 30 girls might have impacted track numbers.)

There is a multi-purpose room used for wrestling, tennis and golf at the high school. The pool was completely renovated two years ago. The soccer field is less than a decade old. The bleachers at Rita Price Simpson Court have been renovated.

“Our facilities look great,” Holland said. “Our weight room is incredible. Our numbers look good in the weight room this year too. We have the facilities. We just now need to get the numbers.”

And after six months on the job, she was asked what she would like the Valley community to know about her if they do not know it already.

“I just hope that they use me as a resource,” Holland said. “I want to be more than just scheduling games and making sure our officials are showing up. If your kid wants to play at the next level, I hope they can come to me and just ask questions on how they can be better and what steps they can do next to achieve what their goals actually are.

“So I hope that I can just be a good resource.”