The Yoga Teacher Who Wants You to Relax on the Gridiron

At 10 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 23, the field at Washington-Grizzly Stadium will trade out helmets and shoulder pads for some yoga mats. People will unroll them beneath the seats and scoreboards, stretch their hamstrings where Griz football players usually run their routes and, for an hour, breathe together in the open air.

Alley Fontenot, a University of Montana law school graduate, longtime Missoulian and registered yoga teacher, will lead the UM Alumni Association’s third annual Yoga in Wa-Griz. The one-hour session is designed for the yoga-curious, the chronically tight-hipped and anyone who has ever wondered what Corpse Pose feels like beneath the shadow of the Griz scoreboard.

“This is your practice,” she tells students at the beginning of every class. “I’m just here to kind of give you some ideas and hold space for you.” If someone needs a break, there is Child’s Pose. If someone prefers to sit in a chair and move gently from there, that counts, too. If someone wants to do their own thing in the back, fine. She is simply glad they came.

That is Fontenot’s particular talent: making everything approachable.

On a rainy afternoon at Clyde Coffee in Missoula, she greets a near stranger with a hug and, within minutes, has made the crowded coffee shop feel like a friend’s kitchen table. She is warm without being rehearsed, funny without trying to be and prone to the sort of digressions that turn a standard professional biography into something more like a weathered road map of Montana, Texas, Panama, Florida, meditation retreats, pharmaceutical sales meetings, dog walks and improbable good decisions.

Her official title is Gift and Estate Planning Director at the Montana Community Foundation. In practice, she helps people think through the biggest questions they will ever ask themselves: What matters most to me? How do I want to give back? What do I hope will carry on after I'm gone?

It’s work that feels natural for someone who has spent much of her adult life seeking meaningful ways to connect.

“I get to use my brain and my heart to help people support this town,” Fontenot said.

Her story starts in Texas, where she grew up in a family with Cajun roots and a mother whose cooking came without measurements. A proper roux, Fontenot explains, begins with flour and oil and requires a patient eye: Keep stirring until it reaches the color of dark peanut butter. It borders on a doctrine — a little intuition, a little commitment and an understanding that you cannot rush the good stuff.

Fontenot came to Montana in 1993, after a college boyfriend invited her to spend a summer in Big Sky. She had seen snow only a handful of times. On the drive north from Texas, it snowed in Yellowstone. Then, that July, about a foot of snow fell high on the mountain. “It was like, oh, you’re not in Texas anymore,” she said.

Fontenot enrolled at UM’s Alexander Blewett III Law School, following an ambition that had been fixed since childhood. She studied women’s studies and political science at Southwestern University, the oldest university in Texas. She interned on the campaign of Ann Richards, the second woman elected governor of Texas, who believed that education was the ticket to opportunity and equality. The experience helped Alley see law as a way to make the world a little fairer.

After graduating in 1996, Fontenot clerked for a judge and then went to work at a large Billings law firm, handling insurance defense litigation –  much of it in workers’ compensation. It was steady work. It was also, she found, a grind. Litigation can turn time into a long hallway of disputes, filings and delays.

“You’re fighting and fighting and fighting every step of the way,” she said. “At a certain point, I was like, ‘I’m not doing this the rest of my life. What am I going to do?’”

Her answer was a sharp left turn into new careers and new places. She returned to Missoula in 2012, making it her permanent home.

There are people who choose Missoula for the surrounding nature and people who choose it because their closest friends are already there. Fontenot chose all of the above — plus the dog walks, the ski community, the kayaking community and the yoga community.

 “We live in a very unique community here,” she said. “I think the best people in the world are right here.”

Fontenot delights in the rituals that bind people together: whitewater kayaking, cold plunges in winter, where an enthusiastic group meets Saturdays near Finn and, sometimes, follow the icy immersion with a dance party; Griz football games, where strangers high-five in the snow after an overtime win; and her daily dog walks with Miss Lyla Garrity, her 13-year-old companion, through the nearby state land.

“Connection is very important to me,” Fontenot said. “I get fulfillment from meeting other people and learning about other people and their stories and connecting in whatever way I can.”

In the ensuing years, her path took many turns, but it always came back to wanting to make the world a better place to live. She eventually landed in the nonprofit sector, accepting the Development Director position at Watson Children’s Shelter and, most recently, her current position with the Montana Community Foundation. This position proved to be the synthesis she had been looking for: a way to use her legal mind and her desire to do good.

Fontenot works with donors, attorneys, certified public accountants, financial advisers and nonprofits to help people create charitable gifts during their lifetimes and lasting legacies upon their passing.

“I feel like the culmination in this zigzaggy path that I’ve taken over the last 30 years,” she said, has led to a moment when “I’m now using all of my skills.” She paused, then landed on the simplest answer to whether the path had fulfilled her old ambition. “Yes,” she said. “I do feel like I’m making a difference.”

Yoga has been another constant in her life. Fontenot first tried it around 1997, while working out at a gym in Billings. She was then a lawyer, spin instructor and road cyclist – a person who preferred speed and momentum. A yoga teacher invited her to class. Fontenot arrived skeptical of its slower pace and left feeling altered.

“Something had changed,” she said. “My energy had shifted. And I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I knew I liked it.”

The practice followed her through the years. She completed an initial teacher training in the mid-2000s, later trained more deeply at Kula Yoga Shala in Jupiter, Florida, and earned her 200-hour Hatha Yoga certification in 2013. The training opened yoga beyond the physical postures and into its wider philosophy: breath, attention, compassion and the often-difficult work of being less hard on oneself.

She was inspired, too, by Brandon Sheehan, a beloved Missoula yoga teacher and Buddhist practitioner who died young. Fontenot describes him as someone who “embodied the practice of yoga” in his classes, professional life and personal relationships.

“He held space for people, all different people,” she said. “He was kind. He was so kind.”

That is the quality she tries to bring to her own teaching. Her classes are alignment-based and slow-flowing, with plenty of warm-up time, accessible cues, modifications and an eclectic soundtrack that leans more modern than stereotypical yoga. She creates a new Spotify playlist for each class, matching the music to the progression of movement.

“I love music,” she said. “I really try to pick music that matches what we’re doing.”

Some students approach her afterward to ask for the playlist. Others come back week after week drawn to the familiar rhythm of the class: a little breathwork, movement on the floor, standing poses, and finally, a return to stillness. It’s a practice that feels welcoming, familiar and, most of all, approachable.

That is the goal for Yoga in Washington-Grizzly Stadium, the Alumni Association event she will lead for the third year. The setting supplies its own sense of occasion. The stadium isn’t traditionally associated with silence, inward reflection or slow exhales. It is where the crowd gets loud enough to shake the metal bleachers. Yet Fontenot sees the same thing in a yoga class and a football game: a group of people sharing an experience bigger than themselves.

At a playoff game, she remembered, snow fell, the Griz won in overtime and strangers became instant comrades.

“You look to your neighbor who you don’t know, you’ve never met them,” she said.

At the stadium yoga event, attendees 16 and older can bring their own mats for the one-hour session, followed by access to local health and wellness vendors. Tickets cost $15, or $10 for students. Griz greats, fellow alumni and fans will be there.

No experience is required, and no perfect pose expected. Come in sweats. Come stiff. Come curious. Come because yoga has carried you through hard seasons. Come because you have never tried it. Yoga in Washington-Grizzly Stadium isn’t something many people get to brag about.

“Anybody can do yoga,” Fontenot said. “There’s always space for anyone to show up and do what they can.”

It is the same invitation that has shaped her own life in Montana. Show up. Take the next turn. Let the path zigzag.

Tickets for the event can be purchased at grizalum.org.