The Indiana High School Volleyball Coaches Association Hall of Fame is filled with coaches that spent most of their careers leading varsity teams.
Terry Sweasy is an anomaly.
Although Sweasy spent six years as the head coach at Columbus North, the vast majority of his coaching career was spent as an assistant, including the last 17 years at Columbus East. But that didn’t stop the 71-year-old from being inducted into the IHSVCA Hall of Fame earlier this month.
“We were sitting there at the banquet and I looked at (wife) Pam, and I thought, ‘Am I deserving? Do I deserve to have may name alongside those?” Sweasy said. “Then on the other hand, I thought, ‘It’s about time.’ It’s nice to be recognized for all the hard work I put in. But I never thought I’d be in the Hall of Fame.”
Unlike the other members of this year’s Hall of Fame class, the induction came as a shock to Sweasy, who wasn’t told before the banquet that he would be honored.
“It was a surprise,” Sweasy said. “I was speechless. To be included in the people that are in the Hall of Fame is hard to imagine, and I’m still on Cloud 9 thinking about it. It’s just something that I thought I would never see in my years of coaching.”
Sweasy, who played on the USA men’s club team for nearly two decades, got into coaching in 1994 at Central Middle School when Ann Rottinghaus was the eighth-grade coach and needed a seventh-grade coach. He spent two years there.
“I texted her and said, ‘This is all your fault. You got me started in this,’” Sweasy said.
From there, Sweasy went to North as freshman coach for one year, JV coach for two years and head coach from 1999-2004. He went back to Central as seventh-grade coach in 2006, then was varsity assistant at East from 2007 until retiring after the 2023 season.
In the meantime, Sweasy spent 11 years coaching club volleyball with Hoosierland and four years with Circle City. He started Columbus Volleyball Academy and ran it for three years.
Sweasy also was head official for the USA Volleyball Hoosier Region for 22 years before retiring from that position in 2018. He became commissioner for the USA Volleyball Hoosier Region in 2020 and still is in that role.
“I think there’s a lot involved in it more than my coaching career,” Sweasy said. “Since I’ve become commissioner, I’ve tried to bridge the gap between club and high school. They should be supporting each other, and that wasn’t being done before. We should work together for the success of these kids. Most kids play club volleyball to become better for their high school teams.”
Sweasy also worked for Cummins for 41 years. He credits Pam, his wife of 40 years, for allowing him to pursue his love of volleyball.
“It’s just been a part of my life forever,” Sweasy said. “When Pam met me, I was playing volleyball, and it’s been nothing but volleyball ever since. She’s been very supportive of me and never given me a hard time about it. It’s been quite a ride.”
