Utah Softball Coach, Stevens, Doubles As Singer, Guitarist

BY MICHAEL C. LEWIS
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE – March 2, 2003

    Mona Stevens has spent her share of time squinting into the sun in seven seasons as the softball coach at the University of Utah. But squinting into the stage lights like a real rock star as she belts out a lick on her glittering purple electric guitar?
    Ooooh, now that's the stuff.
    "It's awesome," she says.
    Not hard to tell she thinks so, either.
    Years after giving up a blossoming music career in Nashville to pursue coaching, the 46-year-old Stevens has rekindled a true love as the lead singer of the Sister Wives, a slightly irreverent and totally rockin' group of four women who already are getting attention after just a few weeks on the Salt Lake City music scene.
    Her passion for the work surges from the stage, too, where her grind-on-the-guitar grimaces and powerful voice prove that this is a woman finally feeding a part of her soul that had been going hungry for a long, long time.
    "She's just a lot more complete now," assistant coach Marianne "Chief" Bullis says. "A lot more balanced."
    Bullis would know.
    She's among the Utah players and coaches who have watched Stevens bring her guitar on softball trips for some time now, strumming and singing on the team bus and at other gatherings while trying to find a satisfying outlet for her musical energy.
    Many of those same players and coaches packed the Zephyr Club in Salt Lake City on Sunday night to watch the Sister Wives make their nightclub debut as the opening act for the band FAB.
    Stevens coached the Utes to a 1-0 victory over Cal State Northridge at a tournament in California that morning, then anxiously made a two-hour drive to catch a flight home and prepare for the show. Some of her players took her shopping after their game the previous day, to make sure she looked just right on stage.
    "And she hates to shop," Bullis says.
    But Stevens was every bit as thrilled with her new jeans as she was with her new band, which blends blues, soul, folk and country sounds in both cover tunes and songs that Stevens wrote before she gave up professional music for coaching.
    "That's why this is so exciting for me," she says, "because I look back and go, 'I cannot just drop that portion of my life off and not do anything about it. I cannot leave it behind completely.' And I had promised myself I wouldn't do that. So now that this opportunity has come up, it just feels like this is what I intended."
    It was some time in coming, though.
    Long before Stevens became the coach who has led the Utes to two Mountain West Conference tournament championships and three appearances in the NCAA Tournament, she was a singer and guitarist who quit her job as a teacher at Evergreen Junior High in Holladay and moved to Nashville on a lark after an audition for the Opryland USA theme park.
    The former all-conference pitcher for the Utes didn't get the job she wanted, but a producer told her she had serious talent. Too much, in fact, for the simple chorus he was constructing.
    "I took that as the biggest positive I could take," Stevens says.
    And just like that, she packed up and moved. Didn't have any money -- "I was dirt poor," she says -- and didn't really know anybody. But she knew that if she didn't take a shot at the big time, she might never know whether she could make it. So she took a job waiting tables and tending bar and set about working her way into the local music scene.
    "It was hard," she says. "Oh, boy, was it hard, because it's cutthroat. There's a million people trying to do the same thing."
    Stevens was in Nashville for 3 1/2 years, and she made dozens of friends and contacts and learned the nuances of professional songwriting and performing. By luck and mutual acquaintance, she found her way into a band with musicians known more for their work with stars such as Trisha Yearwood, Tanya Tucker, Shelby Lynne and Tammy Wynette.
    "We had a hot little band," she says. "And we did really well."
    Yet softball also tugged at her heart.
    Stevens had kept active in her sport by working part-time as an instructor for the Amateur Softball Association, and she continued to love working with athletes. By the time her band began headlining clubs, making local television appearances and thinking about a possible record deal, she began to wonder about the enormous risk of attempting a long-term music career -- in addition to the rugged lifestyle it required.
    "I had a real big decision to make," she says. "I knew that if I stayed with it, we could have been successful. This band could have been very successful. But at the same time, you just don't know. You don't know how it's going to go. You can't bank on anything. So I decided I could still be involved in coaching and softball and do music on the side, and still have both loves."
    So she quit the music business and took a job as a softball coach at the University of Massachusetts. Just a couple of weeks later, as she prepared to move, Stevens was offered a steady job as a songwriter for a publishing company. But she turned it down, having committed to her decision.
    "If they had come to me three weeks earlier, I probably would have done it and I might still be in Nashville," she says.
    Instead, she has lived nearly a decade with only one of her loves flourishing.
    Music suddenly had a hard time finding a place in Stevens' busy life, aside from the occasional wedding or private performance. She coached at UMass for three years before getting the Utah job, loving every minute of it, yet never losing the hunger to perform again.
    "I'd been itching to do it," she says, "but just could never find the time."
    A few months ago, all that changed.
    Stevens had performed for some friends at a dinner show, where she learned that the three musicians accompanying her had been trying since the summer to form a band. And after hearing her sing, they asked her to join them.
    Stevens was skeptical at first, what with that busy schedule.
    "But I couldn't not," she says.
    The women -- bassist Jani Gamble, keyboardist Kirsten Foutz and drummer Amy Boettger -- decided to push themselves and try to find a gig within six weeks. And they did, renting a church hall last month and finding it filled with half again as many fans as they expected. Three hundred, maybe.
    "It was packed," Stevens said. "It was crazy, rowdy fun."
    That's certainly an apt description for their act.
    The Sister Wives -- named as a poke at the polygamist subculture in Utah -- opened their act Sunday night with Stevens playfully snarling through a smoky version of "I'm a Handful" by Francine Reed, then performed a few original numbers before a sultry "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing" by Chris Isaak.
    After nearly an hour, they closed with a cheekily rewritten "Happy Together" by The Turtles that suggested a subversive menage -- "Are you into leaaaather?" the lyrics ask -- and cracked up the crowd.
    "They're unique and they're special," says Susanne Millsaps, the radio host of the "Thursday Breakfast Jam" at KRCL-AM. "The biggest appeal for me is their energy. They have a really big sort of presence up on stage, and I'm also particularly fond of their harmonies, which are exceptionally nice, and I like the selection of music they choose. . . . I think they're going someplace."
    The Sister Wives have been featured a few times on KRCL and hope to branch out and land gigs at the Utah Arts Festival, the Brown Bag Concert Series or the Little Lilith Music Festival this summer. They already have a show scheduled March 30 at Westminster College.
    In the meantime, though, they will keep practicing in Foutz's living room when Stevens' coaching schedule allows.
    The Utes are 6-9 this season, and they play their first home game against Southern Utah on March 27. The Utes also play host to rival Brigham Young on March 29 -- the day before that Sister Wives gig at Westminster, where Stevens again will get to indulge her musical passion.
    "It's not about the applause," she says. "It's about the connection you create between you and your audience. And it's about the feeling you get from the song that you're singing and projecting that out to those that are listening, and getting back from them. There's a give and take between you and the people you're singing for that you just don't capture very many ways."
    Or all that often, either.