Kevin Hovde has been hired as the new head coach for the Columbia men’s basketball team, a job that he begins this season. Hovde, the twenty-fourth head coach in the program’s history, arrives at Columbia after three years at the University of Florida, where, as an assistant coach, he helped the Gators win an NCAA National Championship and achieve an average score of 84.8 points per game (the second best in the country) during the 2024–25 academic year. No stranger to the Lions and New York City, Hovde previously served on the Columbia basketball staff as the operations director and an assistant coach from 2011 to 2016.
In his previous stint at Columbia, Hovde worked under then head coach Kyle Smith, whose hyper-analytical approach to basketball strategy has been nicknamed “Nerdball.” Hovde, who considers Smith a mentor, says he will follow a similar playbook in his own coaching of the Lions. “Offensively, we’ll be up-tempo, data-driven and concept-based, rather than relying on set plays,” he said at an April news conference. “We want to dictate pace — to keep opponents on their heels and play with purpose.”
