Hours after Steve Donahue was released from his role as the head coach of the Penn men’s basketball program, Columbia capped a busy Monday by announcing that Jim Engles has decided to step down from the head coaching role of the men’s program.
“Columbia has meant so much to me, and I’ve given everything I have to make this program the best it can be,” Engles said in a Columbia Athletics news release. “We may not have accomplished our ultimate goals, but I’m proud of the culture we built and the student-athletes we developed on and off the court. I also want to thank Peter Pilling for his support throughout the years and know the future of this program is bright.”
In his nine years in charge at Morningside Heights and eight years of competition, Engles finished with overall and Ivy records of 71-150 and 24-88, respectively.
Engles started his assistant coaching career with a seven-year stint at Wagner College, where he received his MBA, and followed that with a six-year run at Rider. He moved back to New York in 2003, beginning the first of five years on the staff of then-Lions head coach Joe Jones.
The Staten Island native again left for New Jersey, but this time it was for a head coaching job at NJIT.
In his first season leading the Highwaymen, Engles team finished with a 1-30 record. Over the next seven seasons, his teams had an overall record of 110-109, two CIT tournament semifinal appearances and an upset of then-No. 16 Michigan in the fall of 2014.
After Lions went 25-10 in 2015-2016 and won that year’s CIT tournament, including a semifinal victory over Engles’ Highwaymen, and Kyle Smith left for San Francisco, Engles was tabbed as Columbia’s 23rd head coach.
“Jim Engles is a tremendous basketball coach and an exceptional person,” Pilling said upon announcing his new hire. “We know he is the perfect fit to keep our program going in the right direction and will help us compete for Ivy League championships.”
Unfortunately, the program did not better Smith’s results or maintain his level of success.
Engles’ teams never did better than a 13-14 mark in 2023-24, and their best Ivy results were three 5-9 seasons in his first three years in charge.
After three straight seasons with single-digit victories and residence in the Ivy League’s basement with either one or two wins, there were many in the Columbia community that thought the coach would be released after the 2022-23 season.
Columbia then improved to 9-4 in non-conference play the next season and a sixth place 4-10 mark in league play.
With an experienced team heading into the 2024-25 campaign, led by senior guard Geronimo Rubio De La Rosa, hope ran high that the Lions would break into the upper division for the first time since 2016 and earn its first-ever trip to the Ivy League Tournament.
Things looked great for Columbia with an 11-2 nonconference record, which included an 8-0 start and an upset at Villanova.
While the Ivy slate didn’t start out well for the Lions, their first losses came to Cornell, Yale and Princeton, the top three teams from a year ago.
Conference game four at Penn was where the season took a sharp turn for the worse and effectively ended Engles’ tenure.
Rubio De La Rosa left the game with an injury, and Columbia ended up losing to the bottom division Quakers 93-78.
Without the team’s biggest start, the Lions lost nine of the final 10 games of the season, and their 1-13 record put the team three games out of seventh place.
Pilling now has a chance to reboot the program with a leader who will bring it to the top of the Ancient Eight. While that might seem like a tall task, he certainly did it once when he gave Megan Griffith her first-ever head coaching job and her team went from the cellar to its third straight conference title.