Tommy Seward: Tift County High School
Seward was inducted into the Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame in 2021.
Coaching baseball and football is what Tommy Seward did best.
And he has the resume to prove it.
Seward got his first coaching opportunity at Central Macon in 1973, then helped guide them to a region baseball championship in 1975. Coach Seward then took over at Tift County, where he turned the Blue Devils baseball team into a perennial state power. His final baseball project was helping build a fledgling Houston County program. Seward helped the Bears to three winning seasons after the program had struggled.
He was inducted into the Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2021.
Seward's overall record is 332-246.
“I was really surprised,” Seward said when learning he would be inducted into the GDC Hall of Fame. “I had no idea.”
It will be the second of three Hall of Fame honors for Seward. He was inducted into the Tift County Athletic Hall of Fame in 2019. In 2021, he was inducted into the Macon Sports Hall of Fame.
Seward won five region titles and took a pair of Tift County teams to the state semifinals in 1988 and 1990. His greatest success came in Tifton where he coached baseball and football for 20 seasons.
He also was an assistant football coach where he helped coach Central Macon to a state title in 1975, then was an assistant under legendary Tift County head football coach Gene Brodie. At Tift County, Seward assisted coaching the Blue Devils to a state runner-up finish in 1979 and an undefeated state championship season in 1983 when Tift defeated LaGrange 59-6 to win the state title in the state's largest classification.
Seward left Tift County in 1996 to take over at Houston County High School where he was offensive coordinator for the football team and head baseball coach until he returned to Tift County in 2001 as the head football coach and athletic director. He retired in 2004.
A 1963 graduate of Lanier High School in Macon, he was a three-year letterman in football and was all-state in 1962. He lettered for two years in basketball and baseball and played on Lanier’s state runner-up baseball team in 1963, the year he graduated.
He earned his Bachelor’s degree from Georgia College in 1971, then earned a master’s degree from Georgia Southwestern.
Seward left a mark on Team Georgia and the Sunbelt Classic. He was a Charter Member of the Team Georgia coaching staff in 1990 where he continued to coach Team Georgia to four Sunbelt Classic titles in 10 seasons. The Sunbelt Classic was held every year in Oklahoma and annually featured some of the nation’s top talent.
“That meant the world to me,” Seward said of the Team Georgia experience. “Working with Bobby Howard, Buck Buchanan and Steve Franks, it was a thrill to work with them out in Oklahoma for 10 straight years. We had some good times and we won, too.”