Terry Smith’s Penn State story began long before he took over as the Nittany Lions’ interim head coach last October. That’s obvious enough by at least two measures—Smith ’91 Bus is both a Nittany Lion football letterman and a longtime assistant coach—but even those connections undersell the depth of his ties to his alma mater. The story began before he joined the Penn State coaching staff in 2014, before he starred on and captained the team as a standout wide receiver in the early 1990s, even before he chose Penn State after a high school playing career that is the stuff of western Pennsylvania legend.

It began, in a sense, in the mid-1960s, when Harvey Smith Sr. decided he’d had enough of commuting to the small college outside Pittsburgh where he spent his freshman year. He was looking for a residential experience, ideally far enough from home to allow for a sense of independence. “Somewhere I could go away and study,” he says, “but still not too far from my family.” He decided on Penn State.

“And once I got there,” he says, “my whole life changed.”

Transferring to University Park allowed Smith ’68 Bus to earn an accounting degree; it also turned him into a loyal fan of the Nittany Lion football team. “I just fell in love with the place,” he says now. “I did well in the classroom, and I went to every football game. We were on the trimester system, so we had classes on Saturday mornings. I would go to breakfast, go to class, then go to the game. I’ve been a Penn State supporter ever since.”

Harvey Smith headed back to Pittsburgh after graduation and earned an MBA at Pitt, but as he moved into his career and eventually started a family, his rooting interests never wavered. So it was that, years later, when the younger of his two sons was making his own college decision—this time as a football recruit with offers from an array of Division I programs—Harvey did what he could to influence the choice. As Terry Smith remembers it, “My dad kind of hints to me, ‘There’s really only one decision to make.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ So we decided on Penn State.”

Six decades after his father established the family’s Penn State pipeline, and nearly 40 years since his own decision to come to Happy Valley, Terry Smith faced a very different choice this winter: whether to stay. That he did so, signing on with new head coach Matt Campbell after leading the program in an interim role through the Lions’ 22-10 victory over Clemson in the Pinstripe Bowl, provided an ending to one brief, unexpected chapter of his story, and turned the page to the next. As the associate head coach and cornerbacks coach on Campbell’s new staff, Smith is once again an assistant—and, he’s certain, a better one for the 11 weeks in which he held that interim title.

“I felt like I proved to myself that I could do this—that I could lead a program as big as Penn State,” he says. “And I am going to be much better for Matt Campbell because I’ve been in that seat.”

Smith made time to talk about his life and career in mid-December, a little more than a week after Campbell was introduced as the program’s 17th head coach, and 11 days before Smith would lead the team onto the field for the Pinstripe Bowl. Sitting in his modest office in the Lasch Football Building, the snow-covered practice field visible through the window behind his desk, he wore a blue hooded sweatshirt with “Lockdown U,” the motto of the cornerbacks Smith has coached since 2014, printed on the front. His office walls featured an array of family photos, locker nameplates from various bowl games he’s been a part of as a coach, and his framed Penn State diploma, all visible reminders of his loyalty to this place.

Of course, there is an alternate version of Smith’s story, one that might have been set entirely in southwestern Pennsylvania.

He was born in 1969 in Aliquippa, Pa., and raised mostly in Monroeville, Pa., and his childhood coincided with both the Steelers and the local college team enjoying some of their greatest periods of success. “I was a big Pitt fan growing up,” he says. “You had guys like Dan Marino, Tony Dorsett, Hugh Green. At that time, Pitt was doing really well.” You couldn’t blame a football-loving kid for being enamored of the big names on the local teams, but there were compelling reasons for Smith’s attention to wander toward the center of the state. There was his father’s rooting interest, of course, and also his older cousin, Marques Henderson ’88 Bus, a star at Aliquippa High School who went on to play for the Nittany Lions; a standout defensive back, Henderson was a member of the 1986 national championship team and served as a senior co-captain in 1987. “Those were my Penn State connections,” Smith says.

Early on, at least, Smith wasn’t a lock to play at Penn State, Pitt, or anywhere else. “I think he weighed 135 pounds the first time I saw him,” Tom Bradley says with a laugh. Bradley ’78 Bus, ’86 MS H&HD was then a young Nittany Lion assistant coach, in the early stages of building his reputation as an ace recruiter of the talent-rich Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League, better known as the WPIAL. In Smith, he saw an undersized but highly competitive athlete who knew how to win.

Back then, Smith won as a quarterback. As the signal caller for Gateway High School, he led the Gators to three straight WPIAL title games. “We lost the first year, tied the second year, and then won my senior year,” he says. “It was a pretty good progression.” In the second of those three games—all played at the since-demolished Three Rivers Stadium, then home to the Steelers—Gateway settled for a 0-0 tie with North Hills. The rivals met again a year later for the 1986 WPIAL title; both teams were undefeated, and North Hills entered the game ranked No. 1 in the country.

Looking back on it years later, Smith told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “We didn’t score the year before, so we didn’t think we’d ever score against them. I remember [our] coach came to me at halftime and said, ‘Terry, you’re going to have to make a play if we’re going to score.’” He did just that, accounting for the game’s only touchdown on a 1-yard run midway through the fourth quarter, and the Gators held on to win, 7-6.

Smith completed just one pass for 2 yards in that game, a testament to the terrific North Hills defense, and also to the combination of Smith’s elite athleticism and relatively short stature. Harvey Smith remembers his son at 10 years old, “playing on a midget team, this little guy who could barely see over the line, throwing passes down the field.” Bradley might only be half-joking when he remembers that “whenever I saw him play, he’d go back to pass, take a look around, and then he’d take off and run. He won’t admit this, but he was never going to throw the ball.”

Smith himself understood that his college football future would likely be at another position.

“I knew at least to have an opportunity to go to the pros, I couldn’t play quarterback, so the likely position was receiver,” he says. “It was the same path my brother, Harvey, took—he was a high school quarterback, and he had to move over to receiver when he went to West Virginia. We kinda knew that was going to happen.”

As his senior football season ended and the school year bled into basketball season—where he was also a standout—Smith still hadn’t nailed down his college choice. He had completed the service academy nomination process the previous summer, and for a time he assumed he would end up at West Point. But winning had brought attention from bigger programs: local schools such as Pitt and WVU, and eventually Wisconsin and Missouri. He visited Mizzou and came away impressed, and it seemed as if the Tigers might be the right fit.

But Penn State came calling, too.

It was Bradley, himself a former western Pennsylvania high school standout who went on to play defensive back for the Nittany Lions from 1975 to ’78, who handled Smith’s recruiting. But as was common for years on Joe Paterno’s staffs, some of the most valuable scouting reports came not from the football field, but from other settings—especially high school basketball gyms. Watching Smith on the hardwood, Bradley was sold.

“I knew he was a great athlete when I saw him play basketball,” Bradley says. “You sit behind the bench, you see the athleticism up close, the competitiveness, but you also see how he interacts with his coaches. Terry was a winner, you could see it—great athlete, great competitor.”

After considering his options—or maybe just having some fun at the expense of his father, who remembers “Terry and his brother had a little joke on me: ‘He’s going to Missouri’”—Smith committed to the Nittany Lions. He had also played defensive back in high school, and Bradley says Smith could’ve played offense or defense in college. But the coaching staff understood where he could make the biggest impact. Says Bradley: “He was such a good athlete, you wanted to put the ball in his hands.”

Like so many during Paterno’s tenure, Smith redshirted as a true freshman before suiting up for the 1988 season. He went on to be a three-year starter at wide receiver for teams that went a combined 28-8-1 from 1989 to ’91. As a senior, he led the Lions with 55 receptions for 846 yards and eight touchdowns, and he finished his Penn State career with 108 receptions for 1,825 yards and 15 TDs, all numbers that place him among the career top 20 in the Nittany Lion record book.

Smith looks back on those days now as formative for so much beyond football. He rattles off the names of coaches who had an impact—Paterno and Bradley, of course, and also Fran Ganter ’71 H&HD, ’73 MEd Edu, Jim Caldwell, and Jamie Barresi—and more teammates than he can mention, “just a long list of guys. But you kind of learn who you are here. And you learn that the people that you surround yourself with … is the impact you’re going to have in your life. I learned all of that here.”

This was the wisdom he took into the world, and into a brief career in professional football. Smith was picked by Washington in the 11th round of the 1992 NFL Draft, but didn’t stick with the team; from there, he played three seasons in the Canadian Football League—suiting up for the Toronto Argonauts and Shreveport Pirates—and one season with the Albany Firebirds of the Arena Football League. Having given pro ball a shot, he headed home in 1996 and decided it was time to “get a normal job.” He was engaged to be married that fall. It seemed as good a time as any to settle into the rest of his life.

That’s when his father’s advice once again proved pivotal.

As Terry remembers, it was in the classified ads of the old Pittsburgh Press that Harvey spotted a listing for an assistant coaching role at Hempfield High School. “My dad said, ‘Why don’t you try it?’” says Smith, who had never thought of going into coaching. In encouraging his son to try it, Harvey was thinking less about Terry’s ability to win games than his ability to impact the lives of his players.

“He always had this knack for wanting to help other people,” Harvey says. “My belief was that he would be an excellent person to work with athletes, not only teaching them how to play, but how to deal with academics. Just trying to help kids get ready for life.”

Smith got the job and spent a year coaching skill positions at Hempfield, then took an unexpected offer to join the staff at nearby Duquesne University, where his fellow Penn State letterman Greg Gattuso ’84 Lib, a defensive lineman on the Lions’ early ’80s teams, was the head coach. Smith spent four seasons as the Dukes’ passing coordinator before his high school alma mater called: In 2001, he returned to Gateway as the Gators’ offensive coordinator. The next season, he took over as Gateway’s head coach.

The program he had led to glory as a player had fallen on hard times, posting winning records just twice in the previous decade. Smith’s arrival ended the skid: In 2002, his first season, Gateway lost its first two games before going on a nine-game winning streak and reaching the WPIAL semifinals. He stayed in the job for the next decade—during which he also served as the school’s athletic director—and finished his 11 seasons with a record of 101-30 and four trips to the WPIAL championship game. He also sent a slew of players on to major colleges and a handful to the NFL, including his son, Justin King ’07 Lib, who went on to an all-Big Ten career at Penn State.

“Terry brought the swagger of someone who had not only won a WPIAL championship as a player, but had done it at Gateway,” says Kevin Gorman ’98 Com, a longtime Pittsburgh sportswriter who covered Smith’s teams for the Tribune-Review. “He did it with daring playcalling and good defenses, but really, it was the attitude and the swagger, instilling the confidence in the kids that they could win.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Smith took over a program in a difficult moment, understood what was needed to turn things around, and got his players to believe.

The offer to return to college coaching came from a guy who first came to Gateway to recruit one of Terry Smith’s players. Before long, Matt Rhule decided he wanted to recruit Smith, too.

Though they just missed each other in Happy Valley, Smith and Rhule ’97 Lib shared the connection of being Nittany Lion lettermen. In 2013, Rhule was hired by Temple University for his first head coaching job. As he worked to pull together his first recruiting class, Rhule was also finalizing his first coaching staff. It was Smith’s quarterback who drew Rhule to Pittsburgh on a recruiting trip, but it was Smith—whose leadership and communication style Rhule had been impressed by during his visit—whom he ultimately brought back to Philadelphia.

Smith spent just one year with the Owls before getting a call—a year to the day from when Rhule offered him that job—from another coach putting together a new staff. This time, it was James Franklin, just arrived in Happy Valley. In short order, Smith was back on campus as the Nittany Lions’ defensive recruiting coordinator and cornerbacks coach. He’s maintained those titles ever since, but twice added to them: He was named assistant head coach in 2016, and associate head coach in 2021.

Given that title, when Franklin departed after a three-game losing streak last October, Smith was the logical man to step into the interim role. He took over with the Lions facing the most difficult three-game stretch of their schedule: a night game at Iowa, followed by a trip to Ohio State and a home game against Indiana. At the time, the Buckeyes and Hoosiers were ranked No. 1 and 2 in the country.

Anyone reading this likely remembers how it went: In Iowa City, playing at night in one of the noisiest opposing stadiums in the country, and with backup QB Ethan Grunkemeyer making his first start in place of injured Drew Allar, the Lions led going into the fourth quarter before falling 25-24. After a bye week, they traveled to Columbus and trailed the top-ranked Buckeyes by just three points at the half before losing 38-14. Finally back home a week later, the Lions went down early before mounting a second-half comeback and taking a lead late in the fourth. Only a miracle touchdown catch allowed the Hoosiers to escape with a 27-24 win.

The Lions went into the final three games of the season with a 3-6 record. They’d need to win out to make a bowl game and have a chance at salvaging the season. Their first opportunity came at Michigan State, where the host Spartans jumped out to a 7-0 lead. The Lions dominated the rest of the way, leaving East Lansing with a 28-10 victory and celebrating by dousing Smith with purple Gatorade after his first win as head coach.

Then came Nebraska, visitors to Beaver Stadium for Penn State’s final home game. The Lions celebrated senior night by rolling to a 37-10 win that left the home crowd chanting Smith’s name. “The whole night was electric—it was an old-school Penn State night,” he says. “The energy was right. The crowd was right. The players were right—they were so fired up, and they played outstanding. That was what we were capable of doing all season.”

The regular season finale came at Rutgers, an unlikely rollercoaster of a game that required a couple of dramatic late stops by a struggling defense before the Lions escaped with a 40-36 win. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the team to .500 and ensured a bowl bid—in this case, to the Pinstripe Bowl at New York’s Yankee Stadium four weeks later. By the time Smith led the team into the Bronx on the last Saturday of 2025, he knew it would be his final game in charge.

During his interim run, Smith had been direct about his desire to get the full-time job. He knew his lack of prior head coaching experience at the college level would be difficult to overcome; he also knew that if he didn’t get the job, his decision to stay on staff would have a lot to do with who was hired instead. When that turned out to be former Iowa State coach Matt Campbell, Smith’s choice was made much easier.

The two coaches have known each other since Smith was on the sidelines at Gateway and Campbell was at the University of Toledo; Smith used to take his players to 7-on-7 camps there. In addition to providing players the opportunity to develop skills and be scouted, those camps also give coaches a chance to talk. For Campbell, those conversations with Smith made an impression.

“Terry was always such an inspiring human to be around—I loved watching him interact with his players,” Campbell told reporters in December. “It’s been so awesome to watch his commitment to Penn State, to watch how he’s led this program through tough and trying times. I know he’s the cornerstone of this program as a player, as a student-athlete, and now as an incredible football coach.”

Smith’s proven value as an assistant—both as a recruiter of elite talent and a coach who has helped develop more than a dozen future NFL cornerbacks—made retaining him an easy call for Campbell. For Smith himself, the reasons to stay were obvious: It’s his alma mater, and his family—his wife, Alison, and their daughter, Haley—are long settled in Happy Valley. Haley is a Penn Stater as well, having graduated from WorkLink, an on-campus certificate program supported by the College of Education for people with intellectual disabilities. Asked about Haley during a press conference last fall, Smith told reporters, “She is my forever child … she’s like the glue to our entire family.”

For all the depth of his family connections—which also include his nephew, Terry “Tank” Smith ’24 Com, a running back for the Nittany Lions from 2020 to 2023—there were also reasons why Smith might have decided to leave.

“Obviously there was disappointment that I didn’t get the job, and there were other options for me,” he says. “But my relationship with Matt goes way back, so I know what he’s about, his core principles. Especially at this point in my career, I can’t just work for anybody—the guy can’t be a jerk. But Matt’s the right guy. Having a conversation with him put me at ease that he views me as a partner. Once we had that conversation, it was very easy for me to move forward, because my love for Penn State is unconditional.”

Smith’s choice came down to love and loyalty, but credit it as well to a self-assurance that proved stronger than pride. He understands both the legacy and the future he’s working to ensure. And he knows he’s right where he belongs.