As a volleyball and basketball player at CSU, a teacher and coach at the high school and Division II Collegiate levels, and director of events and programs for the National Senior Games Association, Sue Hlavacek is an athlete and competitor of the highest order.
Currently a member of the CSU Athletics Visiting Committee, she set 11 school records as a Viking basketball player in the 1970s and was also an outstanding middle blocker on the volleyball team. She was named CSU’s Female Athlete of the Year three times and in 1991 was the first female inducted into CSU’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
Hlavacek was drafted out of college to play in the first women’s professional basketball league as a center for the Philadelphia Fox. She went on to inspire the next generation of athletes as a physical education teacher and coach with the Mayfield City Schools and as a teacher, department chair, director of athletics and coach at Laurel School.
After seven years at Laurel, she became athletic director at Notre Dame College, where she grew the program from four sports to 23. During her 15-year tenure, Notre Dame teams won a national championship, four conference championships and 10 division titles.
Hlavacek was inducted into the Rhodes High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Laurel School Athletic Hall of Fame as administrator and coach in 2012. She is a two-time recipient of both the Athletic Director of the Year Award from the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics and the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators award for National Administrator of the Year.
She joined the National Senior Games Association in 2013 as director of sports and currently manages all competitions for more than 10,000 athletes in 21 sports at the biennial games.