8/30/1942 – 2/4/2026
Influential Lakewood basketball coach Tim Sweeney passed suddenly last week at the age of 83, leaving behind a long legacy of coaching and mentorship. Sweeney was the boys’ basketball coach for the Lancers from 1980-1992, winning the school’s only CIF-SS championship in the sport in 1982. Lakewood’s gym is named in his honor.
“Tim Sweeney was an amazing coach, educator and administrator,” said longtime Lakewood athletic director Mike Wadley. “Every facet of his educational career spanning from Long Beach Poly to Lakewood he made a mark on the court and in the classroom. There are many Sweeney disciples walking around to this day who carry his legacy with them in their daily teachings.”
Sweeney was a hooper from the first, and was a member of Poly’s 1960 CIF-SS championship team under coach Bill Mulligan–by the time he left Poly, he knew he wanted to be a coach. He played at LBCC and then Chapman College and immediately jumped into the coaching ranks after as an assistant coach at El Monte and Mt. SAC.
A lower level coach at Lakewood and Poly, Sweeney was passed over for the job opening at Poly when it came up–he later joked he couldn’t criticize the hire much since the Jackrabbits hired Ron Palmer instead. He was then hired as the Lakewood coach in 1980, and would later reflect that having to wait to get his first head job was the best thing that could have happened to him.
“Younger coaches today are not being mentored in that way,” Sweeney said in a 2015 interview. “I had to wait eight years. I was brought into the school district to be a head coach and had to wait and work for it. I think that made me a better coach.”
Although he was coaching at Lakewood in the 1980s, he was the first coach to have Black players on the school’s basketball team.
“What helped us out early on was that I did go to Poly and I was close with people in that community,” he said. “I think there was a degree of trust from people, even though Lakewood didn’t exactly welcome desegregation with open arms.”
Sweeney’s 1982 CIF-SS championship team starred Tod Murphy, who earned CIF-SS Player of the Year honors as he led a team featuring Barry Barnes and Dwayne Corbett to the title, defeating Jay Bilas’ Rolling Hills team on the way to the championship game, an 82-70 win over Inglewood in the Long Beach Arena.
Sweeney won two Moore League titles at Lakewood and coached such greats at Murphy (a 12-year pro player with the Supersonics, Clippers and others) and current coach Duane Cooper, who went on to USC and a decade-long pro career that included seasons with the Lakers and Suns.
When Cooper was hired, he talked about wanting to have the same mentoring personal impact on his players at Lakewood that Sweeney had on he and so many others who played for the Lancers. The 1982 CIF-SS championship Lakewood team lives on as one of the Moore League’s best–basketball guru and longtime local sportswriter Frank Burlison said in a 2015 interview it may have been the best non-Poly team he ever saw in the league.
Sweeney went 241-140 at Lakewood, winning the school’s only CIF-SS title and first two Moore League titles; his coaching run there was cut short in 1992 after he was suspended for passing a handwritten note to eight-grader Ortege Jenkins. Jordan coach Ron Massey reported the move as a recruiting isolation, and Sweeney was suspended. He would say later in life that he carried no bitterness over the move, and the school welcomed him back in 2010 for a renaming ceremony in which the campus gym was dedicated in his name.
“I have no hard feelings or regrets,” he would later say. “My memories go back to the great players I’ve coached.”
In addition to his coaching accomplishments, Sweeney was a teacher and assistant principal at Lakewood High for more than three decades, and supervised the Olympic Development League for Long Beach Parks and Recreation.
A devoted family man, Sweeney’s children have gone on to become influential in their own right. His son Tim Jr. coached at Mayfair and then Riverside King, where he won the 2009 CIF State title with his father assistant coaching, and Kawhi Leonard on the court. Another son, Jon, recently bought legendary Long Beach bar Joe Jost’s.
Sweeney’s memorial is planned for March 7 at Friends Church in Yorba Linda, at 1pm.
