Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/277774
couple of years ago, the Penn State football team chose Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" for its pregame psych-up video. Seemed appropriate. It's a song about a Viking invasion in which marauding hordes "from the land of the ice and snow" come to pillage the countryside and vow not to stop until they reach the opposite shore. Penn State, of course, has an ample supply of ice and snow, and strength coach Craig Fitzgerald made for a pretty good Viking, at least in the sense that he seemed utterly impervious to cold. No matter what the temperature, no matter how hard the wind was blowing or what kind of precipitation was falling from the sky, Fitzgerald would step onto the field clad in a T-shirt and shorts. He would gather his players together before the game, and as the anticipation began building to a crescendo, he would tear the shirt off just to show how geeked up he was for the battle to come. Players would go nuts, and Fitzgerald would sometimes drop to the turf and do a breakdancing move called "the worm." Students of medieval seafaring culture will note that this last part is not histor- ically accurate. Fitzgerald's shtick came to symbolize a whole approach to strength and condi- tioning at Penn State. Weightlifting may by its very nature be drudgery, but he made it into a kind of crazed drudgery, and players embraced it. They wore "Iron Lion" T-shirts and seemed to take on a bit of Fitzgerald's driven personali- ty in the weight room. Now, however, Fitzgerald has left for warmer climes, and Penn State's new coaching staff hails not from the land of the ice and snow but from the land of the occasional overnight frost: Nashville, Tenn. Does that mean the strength pro- gram is changing? Yes and no. By his own admission, new strength coach Dwight Galt doesn't have Fitzger- ald's theatrical flair. Come November, you won't see him ripping off his T- shirt off during pregame warm-ups in hope of inspiring the team. "We used to do the T-shirt thing at Maryland no matter how cold it got," said Galt, who worked with Fitzgerald on the Terra- READY FOR LIFTOFF Dwight Galt puts his stamp on the Nittany Lions' strength program JUDGMENT CALL A HEAVY DUTY Galt addresses the team before a lifting session in early March. Photo by Tim Owen