PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Peter Gallagher, head football coach at Ursinus College in Collegeville since 2000, is the program's all-time leader in games coached and won. On his watch, the Division III Bears have been a consistent contender in the Centennial Conference.
Gallagher grew up in Vermont and played his college football at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He remembered wrapping up his high school career by playing in an All-Star Game that was going to cause him to have to hustle to get down to campus for his first college football camp. He flew into the tiny Clarksburg Airport.
"I get off the plane and you walked down the stairs to like, the pavement," he recalled. "I guess I didn't expect really the band to be playing for me at that time, but I certainly expected that there was going to be someone there to pick me up. Well, that didn't happen. So I spent my first day of West Virginia Wesleyan football camp in the Clarksburg Airport."
Gallagher was very interested in getting into coaching and as his college days were winding down, opportunity presented itself.
“I was in the middle of an aggressive social agenda a week before graduation and I'd lost my keys. So I was locked out of my room. I was sitting in the common area. There was one phone – and the phone rang! I'd picked this phone up maybe half a dozen times before," he said.
"So I pick up the phone, 'Is Peter Gallagher there?' 'Yeah, this is Peter Gallagher.' 'This is Bob Benson, I'm the head football coach at Georgetown University.'"
Gallagher would get his foot in the coaching door with the Hoyas. He also spent time as an assistant at Dartmouth, Wagner and Rochester before taking over at Ursinus.
You can listen to the entire interview with Peter Gallagher by checking out the latest episode, above, of the KYW Newsradio original podcast, "1-on-1 with Matt Leon." For more, subscribe on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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