Daniel Gwitt

Daniel Gwitt is entering his second season as an assistant coach with Penn State volleyball and brings valuable experience as a coach and player. Gwitt is a former Division-I women’s volleyball head coach and former men’s player at Penn State University.

In Gwitt' s first year back at Penn State, the Nittany Lions finished the season with an overall record of 26-8 and advanced to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.  The Lions started the season with a perfect 11-0 preseason that included marquee wins over Stanford and Oregon, both of which went on to end the regular season ranked in the top 10 of the AVCA Coaches Poll.

Individually, the  Lions earned four All-Big Ten awards, along with three All-Northeast Region award winners in 2022.  They were also awarded a top-10 recruiting class for 2022 by VolleyballMag.com.   

Gwitt returned to Happy Valley after spending the previous four seasons as an assistant coach at Indiana. In just his first season in Bloomington in 2018, Gwitt helped head coach Steve Aird, a former assistant coach at Penn State, lead the Hoosiers to immediate improvement as they totaled four more wins overall and six more victories in the Big Ten over the prior season. The Big Ten win total was the program's most since 2010. A key factor in the improvement was the defensive effort coached by Gwitt. The Hoosiers went from 277^th in the nation in total blocks the year before to 15^th in 2018 and went from 273^rd in blocks/set to 36^th. 

Gwitt proved himself as a successful recruiter at Indiana while working to get student-athletes to compete in the toughest conference in the nation. He helped put together the 2020 recruiting class that was ranked 15^th in the nation, the highest-ranked class in program history. It included the second-highest ranked individual recruit (No. 32) in program history and two Under Armour All-Americans.
 
A native of Eden, New York, Gwitt graduated from Penn State in 2007 with a degree in communication arts and sciences. He was a member of the men's volleyball team under current head coach Mark Pavlik and helped the Nittany Lions to the Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association (EIVA) Championship and a trip to the NCAA Final Four.
 
Following his time at Penn State, Gwitt joined the staff at Centenary College, a Division I program in the Summit League at the time, and took over as interim head coach in 2007. He was the youngest Division I head coach in the country at the time. He spent three seasons with the Pride, coaching more than 70 matches by the age of 24.
 
In addition to his collegiate coaching experience, Gwitt served as the director of operations and master coach for two of the largest and most successful clubs in Southern California. He took multiple teams to the Open Division for the Girls Junior National Championships. All of those teams finished in the Division 1 SCVA rankings, and his most recent 17s team finished as the top ranked team in the SCVA.