Hall of Fame
Karen A. Sweet was a powerful outside hitter and skilled server on four consecutive NCAA Division III tournament-qualifying women’s volleyball teams.
In a four-year career, Sweet was a two-time All-New England selection by the New England Women’s Volleyball Association (NEWVA) and senior selection to the 12-person American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) All-New England Region team and to the NEWVA Senior Classic. Sweet played before the Little East Conference sponsored a regular-season round-robin schedule and issued end-of-season individual awards.
In addition to also playing one year of softball as a freshman and one season of basketball as a sophomore at Eastern, the East Haddam native stayed on for two years upon graduation in 1998 as an assistant coach to Tom York, then agreed to serve as a 24-year-old interim head coach in 2000 following the late-summer departure of York, who coached Sweet in her senior season upon the retirement of Crabtree.
With the 5-foot-8 inch Sweet, Eastern won 99 matches and lost 59 (62.6 winning percentage). Competing in the years prior to the inclusion of women’s volleyball as an official Little East Conference championship sport, Eastern qualified on an at-large basis for four NCAA tournaments. In Sweet’s career, Eastern averaged playing in eight in-season weekend tournaments each season (including two in San Diego and one in Texas), travelling regularly to upstate New York and throughout the eastern seaboard to face top-rated competition in pursuit of at-large berths to the NCAAs.
Although she was never the tallest player on the floor, Sweet quickly developed to be one of the team’s top offensive threats on the strengths of her vertical leap and explosive arm swing. Playing alongside 5-foot-8 inch setter Michelle Cunningham for three years, and 5-foot-11 inch front-row players Jen Butts and Kathy Kimball (all Alumni Hall of Famers) for two each, Sweet led the team in attack attempts in each of her final two years and in service aces in each of her final three years.
As a senior captain on teams which won three in-season tournaments (including a third straight Little East “invitational” title before the conference’s formal introduction of the sport in the fall of 1998), Sweet played every match for the third straight season and led the Warriors in points, kills, attack attempts, attack percentage and service aces, and was second digs. That year, Sweet’s attack percentage of .250 was nearly 100 percentage points higher than her previous career percentage. Her 1997 total of 111 service aces and 1,587 attack attempts have remained as the season standard for the past 25 years, with her 686 points (the sum of a player’s kills, service aces and blocks) and 549 kills that year still ranking third all-time in a season. That year, Sweet also accumulated the top four marks for attack attempts in a four-set match, the top two attack attempt totals in a five-set match, and the second-best mark in a three-set match. She also equalled her own five-set record of seven service aces that held up for 21 years.
Sweet was named to all-tournament teams twice in 1997 and once as a junior in 1996, when she also received the team’s Most Effort Award.
Today, Sweet still ranks among the all-time Top 10 in seven career categories and is one of only two players currently rated in the Top 10 all-time in both kills and digs. She ranks first in service aces (277), second in attack attempts (4,024), fifth in points (1,575.4), kills (1,215) and matches (151), and ninth in digs (1,483).
Following graduation, Sweet served as York’s assistant coach for two years. As the program’s interim head coach in 2000 – when she actually coached two of her former teammates – Sweet led the Warriors to a 17-15 record, including a share of second place in the Little East and into the LEC championship game following a five-set semifinal victory over Plymouth State University.
In softball in 1995, Sweet appeared in 26 games, starting 23 games in left field and at DP on an 18-14 team, reaching base 18 times with nine hits and nine walks and scoring ten runs; in basketball in 1995/96 under second-year head coach Denise Bierly, Sweet came off the bench in nine games on a team which won the Little East Conference tournament championship over top-seeded host University of Southern Maine and qualified automatically for the NCAA tournament, finishing with a 19-9 record.
Sweet holds a B.A. Degree in Sociology and Applied Social Relations from Eastern and has held numerous coaching positions at all levels. In 2015, she returned to her alma mater at Nathan Hale-Ray High school – where she had been a three-sport star All-Stater – as an assistant volleyball coach before taking over as head coach in the fall of 2020. In the fall of 2022, the Noises were seeded second in the Class “S” state tournament and advanced to the state championship game after winning their first three matches.
Sweet and husband Demetrius Brown reside in Moodus and have four children.
