Dave Van Halanger, Florida State’s strength coach who helped build the Dynasty Era, died at home of a heart attack on April 2, 2023. He was 69.

“I can give you a million quotes on Coach Van; he was the first man I can remember who told me he loved me,” former wide receiver Kez McCorvey said. “After practice or somewhere he’d just say, ‘Kez, I love you.’ At first, I thought it was strange, but when I got older I knew what it meant.”

McCorvey is now influencing young men working as North Florida Regional Director for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. "I am sure he planted seeds in me,” McCorvey said. “At FSU they had a good culture of caring and that helped with the success we had. You felt safe. You knew people cared for you and you were able to give all you could.”

Monday was a day filled with tears tears and laughter as former players and coaches and student-assistants remembered their mentor and friend, a man of humor and abiding faith.

Don Acosta, who shared many of his personal Van Halanger photos with us, was a struggling freshman when an FSU counselor "suggested a nice man who would be able to help." The man taught a strength and conditioning class and was the football strength coach too, Acosta recalled, struggling to hold back tears. It was a perfect union, Van needed free student help and Don needed a mentor.; a prayer answered.

Acosta, who is now a financial advisor, served Van Halanger for several years at Florida State, years that shaped him as a man, a father, a husband and a businessman.

As a 6-foot-6, 250-pound prep athlete, Van Halanger signed with Bobby Bowden at West Virginia. His size, quickness and passion for weight training made him an outstanding collegiate player, earning All-East honors twice and honorable mention All-American honors. Van was a senior co-captain on Bowden’s 1975 Mountaineer Peach Bowl championship team, which was quarterbacked by Dan Kendra Sr.

Van Halanger’s career with the Atlanta Falcons was cut short by injury, so he became West Virginia’s first strength coach for all sports. In 1983 he joined Bowden at Florida State University, where he helped the Seminoles claim nine consecutive Atlantic Coast Conference championships (1992-2000), two national titles (1993 and 1999) with two Heisman trophy winners-Charlie Ward (1993) and Chris Weinke (2000) and dozens of All Americans and NFL draft picks.

Van Halanger suffered his first heart attack at a young age and one wonders if that experience helped to shape his passion for living his life and his faith each day to it fullest.

"Coach Van played such a key role in establishing the culture Coach Bowden had established at West Virginia," said Mark Salva, who played center at FSU from 1984-87 and was a graduate assistant line coach until 1994 when he joined former FSU offensive coordinator Brad Scott at South Carolina. "He was much more than a strength coach. He was someone a player could go to when they needed someone to listen, when it seemed no one would. He knew the heartbeat of the team and often offered relevant counsel to both players and coaches. For me, he was a mentor for a young coach who embodied faith, family, and football and lived it."

Former Florida State nose guard and later strength coach Todd Stroud echoed Salva's thoughts.

"Dave was a special guy, a key component of the run FSU had for all those years and he was there through the entire Dynasty Era (1987-2000)," said Stroud, who is now defensive line coach at the University of Miami. "He had a unique ability to get people to work very hard and yet make it fun. That's what I learned from him and try to emulate today. He also did a great job of echoing Bobby's message of 'we are going to work hard and have fun.' If you wanted to adopt his and Bobby's faith, he was there to help you develop it. He and Clint Purvis built a very strong Fellowship of Christian Athlete program at Florida State and that was also a big part of the success.

"Dave was a lifelong exercise guy. It was his passion. He loved it. He was a connector of people. Every one loved Dave."

“Dave’s positive attitude was very contagious,” said longtime FSU offensive coordinator Mark Richt, who worked with Van Halanger when he was FSU's offensive coordinator and then recruited him to Georgia. “He was a big part of our success at Georgia.”

During their tenure in Athens, the Bulldogs won 106 games, earned two Southeastern Conference championships (2002 and 2005), nine bowl victories, and six top-10 finishes.

Over four decades Van Halanger teams won 300 games, with 18 top-10 finishes and 30 bowl appearances. In all, Van coached 40 first-round NFL draft picks and shaped countless lives.

The 1993 NFL Coaches’ “Strength Coach of the Year” served a five-year term on the National Board of Ethics for the National Strength and Conditioning Association.

Van Halanger was inducted into the USA Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2003. On his plaque they and attribute much of his success to his ability to instill a passion for greatness.

“It is achieved first by training highly recruited athletes in exercises that will help them on the field. Power cleans, squats, and other lower body movements are critical to developing basic strength, while plyometric exercises and sand-pit jumping provide explosiveness and speed,” his Hall of Fame plaque notes. “But Van Halanger regards the mind as the most important muscle in the body. ‘What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve,’ he is fond of saying. Players must visualize greatness in order to achieve it. While head coaches provide direction, it is the role of the strength and conditioning coach, he believes, to provide a winning demeanor.”

Osceola readers will remember the strength and conditioning reports Van Halanger provided the Osceola after spring and fall testing. We believed Van Halanger provided those test result to us because he knew it would give the players an added incentive to give their best effort and would reward those who improved their results from one testing period to the next. Many of those players tell us they still have copies of those issues.

“The biggest thing is he cared about the kids and they knew it,” said former defensive end coach Jim Gladden. “He really, really liked the kids. He had a very open personality with them and they could feel it. They could trust him. He was an encourager. He bragged on them when they needed it, patting them on the back during a time we were trying to build it back up. The players enjoyed him and they responded and he knew what he was doing as a former player under Coach Bowden.”

Said McCorvey: “When I became a Christian, the first man I came to see was Dave Van Halanger. Dave was a great dude. A great man. He had integrity in everything he did. He was the right person to influence young people. He was a super compassionate man; tough, demanding, but super passionate.”

Van Halanger is survived by his wife, Michele, adult children Danielle, Michael, Matthew, Julie and Katelyn. Coach Van also leaves behind a dozen former assistants who followed him into the strength and conditioning field at the collegiate and professional level, as well as thousands of players and assistants whose lives he enhanced.