Little did Scott Swann know that a small Southern Virginia school that was in the early stages of building a football program would lead to both a Hall of Fame-caliber career on the field and a successful military career off it.

A quarterback for the football team from 2002-05, Swann joined the Averett University football team in the team’s third season of play. Originally planning on going to the University of North Carolina, where he had already been accepted, Swann decided to take a tour of Averett’s campus and instantly felt that he fit right in.

“It just so happened my first recruiting visit was sometime in October or November of 2001,” Swann said. “I went there, toured the campus and really, really liked the place. I had a really good feeling about it. I liked the coaches, it was Mike Dunlevy and J.D. Shaw back then as the head coach and offensive coordinator. I was impressed with their thought process, their mentality and the product they sold. They did a really good job with it. I kind of fell in love with it.”

Swann immediately slid in as the starter from the 2002 season opener against Gallaudet University. During this time with the program, he watched firsthand as the team was built from a growing program to a conference competitor. 

“It was exciting,” Swann said. “Coach Dunlevy, the one thing he always did really well was set goals, goals that were on one hand hard to beat but on the other they were achievable. The first few years of the program, there weren’t a lot of wins, and to see someone come in and say, ‘We want a conference championship, that is our goal no matter what’ and to see the process from a team that won two games my first year to five games my second to six games my third and seven games my fourth before watching them win the conference title the next year, it was incredible to see that growth, be a part of the process, watch everybody get better... 

“I’m sure from a coaches’ perspective that would be a great thing to watch, but even as a player to see that much growth in that amount of time, and to watch the team grow — I think we had 32 people on the roster at the end of my first season, to by the time I finished there were over 100 people on the team —  just that alone, the participation and number of people that they were not only able to recruit but get people to buy into the program, to me that’s still the most phenomenal thing and the reason we started winning more games.”

During his playing days, and even after, Swann never thought he would get the call that he was being inducted into the Averett Athletics Hall of Fame — an exclusive club he’ll join when he is inducted during Homecoming on Oct. 19.

“Every year I saw the list come out so it was in the back of my head over the years,” Swann said. “But when I was playing? No, 18-to-22-year-old kids don’t consider things like that too much. The future’s not always what’s on our mind, I was just trying to do the best I could out there.”

Swann’s induction makes him the fourth football player in the Averett Hall of Fame, joining Kelvin Hutcheson, Jeff Hughley and Jermaine Moore. He is humbled to be in this elite company of Cougar greats. 

“It was awesome, it was really cool,” Swann said. “Those guys were great players, I’m not quite sure I deserve to be on the list with them. It was a really, really awesome feeling.”

To this day, Swann holds several program records, including most career yards (4,736), most pass completions in a game (34), season (175) and career (424), and most pass attempts in a game (57) and career (781). With the emphasis on passing in today’s college football, he is pleasantly surprised to still maintain these records almost 14 years after he finished his playing career. 

“The thing that surprised me the most about it is when I first started playing, the conference didn’t really throw the ball much,” Swann said. “Really nobody in the conference did… To still hold records in things like completions, attempts and yardage is a pretty big deal for the last 15 years with the way college football has developed. When I started playing, everybody ran the ball, especially at the D-III level because it was simpler and generally more reliable, so to still have those records is pretty cool.”

Swann mentioned a handful of good memories that have stuck with him over the years, from beating Chowan College his freshman year to playing in his last career game to throwing a touchdown pass after missing most of the season with a broken leg to becoming the first football player in conference history to win the Don Scalf Award in 2006. The memory that sticks with him the most, though, is a 46-44 triple-overtime victory over Ferrum College in 2004.

“Sadane Munoz rushed for the winning touchdown, in triple overtime,” Swann said. “Then Jeff Hughley turned a very bad play into a two-point conversion to give us the lead. I remember the play, it was a wide receiver screen and he should have been tackled when he caught the ball, somehow he didn’t and he got into the endzone, then the fans rushed the field. That is my fondest memory of the days I played and I think most of the guys that I played with, that is what they would put up there. To go toe-to-toe with that team and beat them in a dog fight in triple overtime was just great.”

Of all the fond memories from his playing career, none come close to him meeting his wife, Erin, at Averett. Currently living in Mobile, Alabama, they have been married for over 10 years have three children together — including twins who were born in April 2012 while the third was born in September 2016.

“She was a couple years behind me [academically],” Swann said. “We got married when I went to flight school at Fort Rucker in Alabama, right after she graduated in December 2008. She’s been kind enough to hang around for the last 10, almost 11 years. ... Meeting my wife has to be the best memory I have from Averett. It’s the one that’s carried me the farthest in my life. Absolutely by far.”

Swann originally didn’t know what he wanted to do as a career, until he came across an aviation open house on a visit to Averett in the spring of 2002.

“I thought, ‘You know what, I could do this, this seems pretty darn cool,’” Swann said. “I couldn’t do both of those things at Carolina certainly. It just seemed like the perfect place to learn a valuable skill and also continue to play, which I was lucky enough to get the chance to do. Averett just kind of fell into place, a couple of random circumstances… I think I did pretty well.”

Little did he know that this would help lead him to a successful career in the United States military. Thirteen years after graduating from Averett, Swann currently flies the MH-65 Dolphin helicopter for the United States Coast Guard in Mobile. He’s an instructor pilot for the aviation training school, so he qualifies new pilots so they can fly the same helicopter. He has been doing that since last year, but he has a wide variety of stops before that. 

After graduating in May 2006, Swann stayed in Danville to finish up flight certifications. He then went to the Army, applied for the warrant officer flight training program to fly helicopters, got accepted and went to basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in February 2007. After that, Swann has been all over the place, from Alabama to California and even had a stint with the 101st Airborne Division in Fort Camel, Kentucky, which led to a year in Afghanistan. After getting out of active duty, Swann joined the Army National Guard, where he flew helicopters in the Gulf of Mexico. After that, Swann moved back to California to join the Coast Guard, where he stayed for three years before moving back to Mobile, where he is today. 

“I look at some of my peers and see that as many moves as they’ve had in their entire career, I’ve had as many in about half that time,” Swann said. “It’s been a lot of moving.”

Swann looks back on his time at Averett with fondness, as it gave him the opportunity to do so much despite being a smaller school.

“Being a student-athlete in college and flying at the same time, Averett’s a pretty unique place to be able to do that,” Swann said. “There’s not a lot of schools that can say they offer those two things, especially at the Division III level. That amount of structure while in a learning environment in college and then the athletic environment and also flying at the same time, it seemed to fit pretty well with my personality.”

Overall, Swann credits the full student-athlete and aviation experience he got while at Averett to help better prepare him for his career in the military.

“Trying to cram all of that stuff — the classwork, the football and also the aviation, which is three different campuses — managing all of that either as an old teenager or a young man kind of helps you learn how to prioritize, how to be disciplined about studying, be disciplined about getting work done, staying in shape, which the football aspect of that helped me out tremendously,” Swann said. “Looking back on it, I couldn’t think of a place that could’ve prepared somebody as a small school like that... 

“I always sort of compared it to some of the people I worked with who went to service academies, that did ROTC, they talk about how everything they did at those places is laid out for them. They have designated study hours, designated physical fitness hours, designated class hours and designated extracurricular activities that they do anyway. Looking back at Averett, I had to learn how to do all those things on my own. The work I’ve had in the military, whether that’s physical training, flight planning, desk work, I’m kind of left prioritizing those things on my own. So I think Averett was a great place to learn how to do that.”

While Swann’s career has obviously kept him busy, he has paid attention to Averett from afar and is proud of where the program is at today.

“I’ve only been able to keep up with them on the internet, I’ve seen a couple of the broadcasts,” Swann said. “To watch them grow over that amount of time and for Coach Adams to come in with his message — it’s kind of funny that it looks so much like it did with Coach Dunlevy for a while—but to see Coach [Cleive] Adams come in and rebuild that team, set a record with wins and watch some of the players do very well in that time span, it makes you feel good. To be a part of the initial stages of that really makes you feel good, there’s some pride associated with that.”