Penn State Football: Longtime Director of Performance Enhancement Dwight Galt III Retiring

Dwight Galt III, Penn State football’s longtime assistant director of performance enhancement, is retiring, Penn State confirmed on Friday afternoon. Penn State listed a job opening for the position on Friday.

Galt has been a staple at Penn State under coach James Franklin and helped develop a whole host of players who excelled not only during their careers but at the NFL Draft.

“Being a part of this is phenomenal,” Galt told StateCollege.com earlier this summer. “I’ve kind of died and gone to heaven. I really do sincerely feel that I have the best strength job in college football. I really do feel that. I’ve just been so blessed. But you know, I have a family. I’ve got nine grandkids and four children and an unbelievable wife puts up with me. Physically I feel good. I love working here, but there’s the family consideration. At some point you just you just wonder, at my age do I want to spend this many hours being away from from my grandkids? So that’s really the only consideration. Besides that I’m signed up and ready to roll.”

Galt first joined Franklin’s staff at Vanderbilt after a long tenure at Maryland and made the transition from Nashville to State College in 2014.

For Franklin, Galt’s departure marks the latest in a growing list of longtime confidants that have either retired or made a career change. Longtime friend and defensive coordinator Brent Pry recently took over as Virginia Tech’s head coach while Senior Director of Football Operations Michael Hazel eventually joined Pry at Virginia Tech as Pry’s Chief of Staff.

Franklin told StateCollege.com about the importance of Pry and Galt in particular earlier this summer.

“Having people that you care about, and they care about you, both in terms of professional and personal matters [is huge],” Franklin said. “That you can go talk to about anything like highly, highly personal issues or sensitive professional issues that you can go talk and you’re gonna value their opinion, because you don’t have to spend an hour explaining the background to everything.”

“So it’s just valuable to be able to go to [Galt] and get his perspective, whether I agree with it completely or not it’s good to hear. And sometimes it’ll impact me in the moment. Sometimes I’m unsure. I sleep on it and 24 hours later I’m like, okay, that makes sense. I get it now. The same way with Brent, we’ve been together long for a long time. And those guys can push me when I need to be pushed, but also when I make a decision that maybe the majority of the room doesn’t understand, they usually do. So when we break the meeting and leave, they’re going back and reinforcing it. There’s tremendous value, they’re the probably the two guys as well as Kevin and Hazel, depending on the topic we’re talking about but those are the guys that I can go run things by because I try not to make decisions in a vacuum. That’s where you make mistakes just hiring a bunch of people that look like you and think like you. If you’re not careful you come stale over time. [New and/or different people] bring in fresh ideas, which is I think a little bit of a strength and a weakness of this place.”

Who will fill that emotional void remains to be seen, but Penn State could look for an internal promotion to fill Galt’s role with either longtime strength assistants Chuck Losey or Barry Gant Jr. Both have been with the program since Vanderbilt and have also been staples within the strength program.

“James is as advertised,” Losey told StateCollege.com this summer. “He prides himself on being a relationship-based coach, and he’s like that with the players; he’s like that with the staff. It is a profession where people bounce around a lot and I think sometimes people make the assumption in this profession that loyalty doesn’t exist anymore. I would highly disagree with that. I know personally, I’m loyal to James Franklin; I’m loyal to Dwight Galt… As a young head strength coach, I thought I had a lot of things figured out, and I did, but there was still a lot more to learn, especially from a guy like Dwight who had been in the profession for going on at that time 25, 30 years. So it was just kind of like the stars aligned.”

“That’s kind of why I’ve stayed with James; it’s just that I have the utmost confidence in him. I have the utmost confidence in Dwight. I wouldn’t change our situation. Our families are close. Our wives hang out together. I know their kids very well. They know my kids very well, so it’s, you just don’t find that often in this profession, and I’m not interested in giving that up any time soon. Not for a quick payday. You know, I tell people all the time my associate director position here at Penn State is better than 95% of the director positions out there.”