Coach With the Most

The text message wasn’t a message. It was more like a virtual command.

“Get on that flight tonight!”

Howard “Howie” Endelman ’87 read it and thought, “I know I should, but …”

It was early on a January Monday — 5:22 a.m. to be precise — and Endelman, the Bidyut K. Goswami Head Coach of Men’s Tennis, was clear-eyed enough to know that the sender, his good friend Patrick McEnroe, was probably right. McEnroe was messaging from the Australian Open, in Melbourne, where he was doing color commentary for ESPN. The tourney was still in its early stages, but already big news had happened.

Michael Zheng ’26, an NCAA two-time tennis champion and the number-one player on Endelman’s team, had surprised much of the pro tour with a first-round upset of Sebastian Korda, ranked number 51 at the time. College students aren’t supposed to knock off the pros, or at least not in Grand Slam events. And considering that Zheng was the first Columbia player in 32 years to appear in a Slam made his win even more out there. But Endelman — who had recruited Zheng for months against top collegiate rivals, then spent years honing his game — missed the victory. He was in New York City, where the Lions had an early-season match against the University of South Carolina. And now he had to prep his team to play Illinois at week’s end. Yes, he wanted to be there for his prized player’s next match, but it was in just a day or so — and Australia was a world away ...

... and Endelman decided to book the first flight he could.

“I was like, whoa, what are you talking about?” Zheng recalls of learning that his coach was headed Down Under. But then he adds that the quixotic trip was Endelman just being Endelman: “He’s gonna go that extra mile to support the people, the team, close to him.”

Sure, but 10,000 miles?

By Wednesday afternoon in Melbourne, a bit foggy but match-ready, Endelman sat courtside watching Zheng take a one-set lead over Corentin Moutet, the number-32 seed. As the match played out, it would be the highlight of the coach’s travels. Zheng lost the next two sets, and then retired with an injury early in the fourth. His Australian Open adventure was over, and so was Endelman’s — he was on a flight back to New York City the next day. “A 77-hour journey,” Endelman says, shaking his head, “and I was on the ground 24 hours.”

Those in the know say the mad dash to Melbourne reflects Endelman’s coaching bona fides and the drive that’s propelled Columbia men’s tennis to national prominence. In a sport usually dominated by the ACC and SEC, Columbia reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA tennis championships in 2024 and 2025; no other Ivy League team has ever gone that far in the tourney. (This past spring, the Lions narrowly missed the Sweet 16, losing to eventual champion UVA.) Endelman’s team has also won or tied for the last three Ivy League titles. And then there’s Zheng. Endelman won over the New Jersey native — a Wimbledon junior finalist in high school — after he had already committed to tennis powerhouse Stanford. In four years, he achieved more than most college players (let alone Ivy players), competing in three NCAA single finals and claiming the championship in the past two. He’s the first repeat winner since 2012 and the first champion from the Ivy League in more than 100 years.

That the titles — team and solo — have come on Endelman’s watch is no surprise to some, including teammates when Endelman starred on the Columbia squad in the mid-1980s. “Howie was born to be a tennis player and a tennis coach and a Columbia tennis coach,” says Evan Ratner ’85, a fellow Lion on the 1984 Ivy championship team. It was the first of 11 titles Endelman has been a part of as a player or coach. “There’s such a love and respect for him from all the alums.”

“He definitely loves coaching,” says Max Schnur ’15, BUS ’26, who played for Endelman and returned as an assistant coach following a few years on the pro tour. “I’ve heard him say many times that he feels like coaching gives him purpose. It’s what he’s supposed to be doing.”

Bid Goswami knows that all too well. The former Lions coach heard of Endelman in late 1982 from a tennis guru at the famed Port Washington Tennis Academy on Long Island. At the time Endelman was a high school senior drawing attention from other Ivy coaches. Goswami, then in his first year at Columbia, would make the “feisty” kid from Roslyn, N.Y., one of his first recruits and name him team captain after his sophomore year. Then, a quarter-century later, he coaxed Endelman from the corporate world back to Columbia as his associate head coach before passing the main job on to him in 2019.

“Tennis was his number-one passion,” Goswami, who won 14 Ivy titles during his 37-year career with the Lions, recalls of the teenage Endelman. “But then he started living Columbia blue. Those two things, put together, is a good combination.”

Or, in tennis terms, advantage, Lions.

Game, Set, Endelman

Howie Endelman got hooked on tennis by growing up in one of the sport’s top incubators. In the 1970s and early ’80s, Long Island and Queens produced the likes of Vitas Gerulaitis and Mary Carillo and a future Hall of Famer, John McEnroe. The next generation wanted to be just like them, including McEnroe’s kid brother Patrick and his frequent hitting partner (and later texting buddy) Endelman. They played not far from The West Side Tennis Club, the original home of the U.S. Open. “My dad always used to take us to the round of 16 on Labor Day Monday, and school started the next morning,” Endelman says. “I remember being there with my brother [Rob ’91], and the sun would be going down, and thinking, ‘Oh, man, I gotta go to school tomorrow.’”

It also conjured the dream of one day playing in the Open — but first came serves and volleys at Columbia. When he arrived in Fall 1983, the Lions’ program was middling. The team hadn’t won an Ivy title in a decade. It played on clay courts, often a disadvantage when most opponents played on harder surfaces. Still, there were signs of promise. Goswami was starting his second coaching season; he had Ratner and a roster of upperclassmen with big-time credentials. And three highly touted freshmen from the New York City area — Endelman, Matt Litsky ’87 and Phil Williamson ’87 — were about to bring an added jolt.

Ratner recalls a match in Florida when the youngbloods gave notice of what they could do. Against Rollins College, a perennial Division II power, Litsky endured an endless singles match before winning. Hours later, Endelman, who earlier in the day had won his singles match, teamed with junior Gary Jacobs ’85, grinding though three tense sets of doubles to clinch a Columbia victory. “That set the whole stage,” says Ratner, who played professionally before starting a finance career. “The grit of these guys rubbed off on everyone else.”

The Lions went undefeated, topping the season with an Ivy championship, a title they would duplicate in Endelman’s senior year. Along the way, he developed more than his on-court game. With a push from Goswami, he and Litsky traveled to India, their coach’s home country, during winter break of their junior year. They went to play a series of small tournaments, but got an unexpected education along the way. “These guys needed to see how life could be tougher than just going to class and having nice warmups and nice shoes and nice racquets all the time,” Goswami says. “They got to see what the other side of the world is like.” The result: A more mature Endelman returned to campus, better prepared to be captain. And for two seasons, his former coach recalls, “he did an unbelievable job keeping the team together.”

Endelman graduated with a degree in political science, then tried the pro tour for three years. He lacked the quickness to be a singles threat, but his serve-and-volley game made him competitive in doubles, and at one point he held a world ranking of 183. The highlight came in 1988 when he made the main draw of the U.S. Open. “That was a lifelong dream, to play in the majors,” Endelman says — especially a major in his backyard. But in a New York minute, it was over. He and his partner, Peter Palandjian, a one-time rival at Harvard, lost to a pair of Swedes in straight sets. “We thought [we had] a pretty good draw because those guys were baseline guys, singles players,” he says with a slight chuckle. They learned otherwise. “Man, I don’t think we’d ever seen a return of serve like they had.”

As his playing career wound down, Endelman set his sights on law school. In the fall of 1989, he took the LSAT and started applying. But then an unexpected detour postponed his plan. He got a call from Al Paul, Columbia’s athletics director at the time, letting him know there was a sudden need for an interim women’s coach. “Hey,” Paul asked Endelman, “can you help us out and just coach the team for one semester?”

One semester turned into three seasons, enough to give Endelman a taste of the coaching life. Eventually, he graduated from Boston College Law School, practiced at Clifford, Chance, Rogers & Wells for three years, and then transitioned to investment banking and private equity work. Always, though, Columbia tennis stayed on his radar; working in the city, he regularly made it to matches. Goswami saw the attraction, and never hesitated to hint about a return to the sidelines. Endelman never dissuaded him from trying.

“My mother was a teacher, and my dad was a stockbroker who later became a manager of brokerage offices, but his main thing was to develop people. He always used to say, ‘I’m trying to help people grow in their careers and in their lives,’” Endelman says. He saw his sport doing something similar. “If I could somehow use tennis to give people transferable skills to help them succeed in whatever avenue they take, that, for me, would be incredibly fulfilling.”

Tough Yet Tactical

The chance came in 2010. Goswami convinced Endelman to leave Wall Street for 218th Street. There, at the Columbia Tennis Center (now the Philip & Cheryl Milstein Family Tennis Center), the two built a powerhouse over the next nine seasons, winning six Ivy titles and peaking in 2019 with a national ranking of number five during Goswami’s final season. The formula: Goswami brought a fatherly wisdom earned through nearly four decades of coaching; Endelman brought Long Island toughness.

“He sees his role as a coach as pushing guys outside of their comfort zone,” says Schnur, who joined the team as a first-year in 2011.

Case in point: For much of his Columbia career, Schnur played doubles with Ashok Narayana ’15, and the pair gradually grew their national ranking. But in the fall of their junior year, they found themselves getting handled by lesser opponents. Before a tournament in New Haven, Endelman pulled the two aside — and raised the heat. “Tomorrow, matches start at 9:00 a.m., so that means every team is going to show up at 8:00 a.m. If you two guys want to be great, like you keep telling me,” Endelman sternly said, “then you’re going to show up at 7:00 a.m. — and we’re going to do a full practice from 7:00 to 8:00. And then when every other team shows up, they’re going to look at you guys, shirts completely full of sweat, and say, wow, these guys really want it.” The shove worked. Schnur and Narayana later won the National Indoor Intercollegiate Championship.

Over time, Endelman has learned to mix the scrappy with the savvy. He regularly texts players with motivational bromides culled from such coaching VIPs as Bill Belichick, Dean Smith and Dan Hurley. And he thinks two steps ahead of the competition. Heading to Yale for a match a few years back, Endelman heard that rain was in the forecast. He told his players to load squeegees onto the team bus; his crew would make sure the courts were dry in case Yale didn’t. During matches, clad in a light-blue quarter-zip and a C-embossed baseball cap, he’ll quietly and intently watch shots from the sidelines, hands on hips. But once there’s a break in the action — not just between games but between points — he’ll rush the court to give his players his three cents.

“I try my best to exude composure and confidence, because the last thing they need is to see their coach going nuts. So I try to just stay as calm as possible ...” He waits a beat. “The best I can.”

At other times, especially in practice, the coach can be a motormouth, tweaking his guys with one-liners that make them chuckle as much as cringe. “Howie is quite the character. He’ll be chirping at you during practice; he knows what gets under your skin,” Zheng admits. The thing is, the coach can take as well as give. Most of his players can do spot-on impressions of his subway-fast Long Island accent.

Endelman’s coaching ethos — he describes it as a balance between accountability and love — has produced a culture conducive to winning, and at a level no other Columbia or Ivy League team had previously achieved. In making their deep runs in the 2024 and 2025 NCAA tournaments, the Lions had to overcome teams from power conferences (Arizona and NC State) and their own outlier status — “What are those guys doing here?” as Endelman put it. In both tourneys, the team would lose to the number-one seed, but the players came away knowing they could compete on the highest level. “I think if you were to talk to the top coaches around the country,” Endelman says, “they would probably put Columbia in there, with a few other schools.”

This past season, the Lions didn’t make it out of the first weekend of the NCAAs. They beat St. John’s in the opening round, and then, against UVA, now a seven-time collegiate title-holder, they led 2–0 early. The possible upset withered with each succeeding match; the Cavaliers clinched the win when Zheng fell in three sets. Different was how the coach described the post-match feeling compared to previous years.

Going forward Endelman knows he has a solid base. He’s also aware of the challenges. He’s now coaching in the Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) era, so many top recruits are looking for more than just help with their topspin. And he faces a future without his NCAA champion, Zheng. “It’s the end of an era,” he said days after the Lions got bounced from the NCAA tournament. Still, at 60, and after a lifetime on the courts, he’s willing to go the distance to get the job done.

Endelman indicated as much during a speech this past March, while accepting a John Jay Award for distinguished professional achievement; he capped his remarks with a story of what it took to get Zheng to choose Columbia. It was summer 2021, and Endelman had flown to Kalamazoo, Mich., to see the prospect in a tournament. After the match, he joined Zheng and his parents for dinner, during which Zheng’s father, Joe, told Endelman that the family was driving home to New Jersey the next day. “Would you like to join us?” Joe asked. The coach gulped.

Here was a chance to spend 11 hours on the road with a top recruit. Of course he would, he told the Zhengs, but first he needed to clear the trip with University Compliance. With his John Jay audience waiting for the reveal — what level of red tape was coming? — Endelman took his time. Finally, he shared that Compliance green- lit the trip with one condition: “You just can’t pay for gas and tolls.” The coach smiled, the audience laughed. He’d landed the punchline as well as the recruit.

Zheng remembers that trip, too, his dad at the wheel and some peripatetic tennis coach in the front seat. Through Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the two kept up a running dialogue, while in the back seat he tried sleeping through the chatter. “At the time I thought this guy was probably a little bit crazy. I’m not sure how many other coaches would do that,” Zheng recalls. He pauses. “It just shows his character,” he adds, “and how much passion he has for the program.”

Charles Butler ’85, JRN’99 is a journalism professor at the University of Oregon. He is researching a book on former Columbia football coach Lou Little.