Having delivered the final ground stroke of his college tennis career, IUPUI graduate David Beasley can’t wait to begin working in law enforcement.
Greenwood native Beasley, a criminal justice major, will realize a dream that dates back a decade.
“Making an impact in the community is important to me,” Beasley said. “Growing up in Greenwood, my next-door neighbor had been a Virginia state trooper. I heard his stories all the time and I wanted to develop some of my own.”
Beasley graduated from IUPUI in May. He starts 17 weeks of training at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy in Plainfield this month. After graduating from the academy, he’ll become a patrol officer for the Indianapolis Airport Police Department.
One of the two four-month summer internships Beasley served while at IUPUI was working at the airport under the direction of lieutenant Angela Lee. The other was at the Drug Enforcement Administration in Indianapolis after his junior year.
“The internships kind of reinforced it for me,” Beasley said. “It was very interesting to see both sides of it. You have your local law enforcement and you have federal, which is wildly different.
“With local, you’re going to be a patrol officer to start with no matter where you go. You’re interacting with people a lot more. You’re writing traffic tickets, you’re doing field arrests. Federal law enforcement is a lot more paperwork, a lot more surveillance.”
Beasley was born in Greenwood, but his family moved to Boca Raton, Florida, early in his elementary school career. It’s there he learned how to play tennis — a skill that ultimately benefited him when the family moved back to Greenwood a few years later.
As an 11-year-old he started taking lessons from former Center Grove standout Bryan Smith, a state singles champion for the Trojans in 1991 and 1993.
It didn’t take long for Smith to learn about Beasley’s tennis skills and competitiveness.
During Center Grove’s summer tennis camp, Beasley lost matches to three opponents. The next day he asked Smith if he could play the same three players again.
Eventually sidelined by two elbow surgeries and a back issue that prevented him from playing competitive tennis for about two years, Beasley began to think seriously about a future in law enforcement.
Not until 2014, his senior year of high school, did he begin expressing interest in possibly playing college tennis.
IUPUI coach Brandon Curry took a chance, and it’s paid off.
The top singles player for the Jaguars this season, Beasley also played No. 3 doubles. He finished his career with 56 singles victories, the most in the history of IUPUI men’s tennis.
Beasley recently was honored as IUPUI’s top male athlete academically with a cumulative grade-point average of 3.71 and is one of four recipients of the prestigious Mel Garland Distinguished Student-Athlete Award.
“David was special from day one,” Bryan Smith said. “You don’t get to be around that type of person very often who has that type of passion for everything he does.”
