MEN’S BASKETBALL: When Yale visits Columbia, Tobe Carberry has the inside scoop
An assistant at Yale from 2017 to 2020 and a graduate of New Haven’s Hillhouse High School, Columbia assistant coach Tobe Carberry said competing against his former colleagues and players feels strange but extra competitive.
Tim Tai, Staff Photographer
Tobe Carberry, an assistant coach on the Columbia men’s basketball team, probably knows more about Yale, his team’s opponent Saturday, than any other opposing coach in college basketball.
Carberry spent three years as an assistant under Yale head coach James Jones before beginning his current position at Columbia in August 2020, and he is still deeply familiar with nearly every player on the Yale roster. His first season with the Bulldogs in 2017–18 was the year Yale’s senior leaders Azar Swain ’22 and Jalen Gabbidon ’22 joined the program, and he helped recruit many of the Elis’ current rookies.
A graduate of New Haven’s Hillhouse High School, Carberry was back home in the Elm City when the Lions visited Yale for a game two weeks ago, lingering on the court to greet former players after Yale’s 83–72 win. On Saturday, Yale (13–9, 7–1 Ivy) plays Columbia (4–17, 1–8) on Carberry’s new home floor in New York City.
“It’s a weird feeling coming back and having to compete against them,” Carberry said in a phone interview after Columbia’s practice concluded Thursday afternoon. “But it also sparks competition, it also sparks preparation. You want to do your best and show yourself well against some of your former mates.”
Yale went 30–12 during Carberry’s three seasons working out of Ray Tompkins House and is off to a 7–1 start to Ivy League play during Carberry’s first full season in New York. Columbia, which sits in eighth place right now, is the least experienced team in the Ancient Eight, with more than 65 percent of its scoring this season coming from rookies.
On a different Ancient Eight campus, Carberry is relishing a new challenge. He told the News he is excited to be a part of a young Ivy League team building towards the future and said Columbia head coach Jim Engles has instilled confidence in his assistant coaches and their ideas, giving them a major role in the “culture build.” And despite the warmth that remains between him and his former colleagues and players at Yale, he is still looking for an upset win over the Ivy League’s first-place squad.
“In terms of Yale, he is just super intense about getting one,” Columbia senior forward Ike Nweke, the Lions’ leading scorer, said. “Who doesn’t want to be competitive and beat the school that you were formerly at?”
In the teams’ first meeting, which was postponed from its original date of Jan. 2 because of COVID-19 cases in Yale’s program at the start of the new year, Yale beat Columbia 83–72 behind a career-high 37 points from Swain. Nweke scored 19 of his team-high 21 points after halftime as the Lions outscored Yale in the second half, 44–37.
A couple days after the game, Nweke said there was a lot of inside knowledge Carberry possessed: how to not get beat on Yale’s offensive cuts, court positioning, signals and play calls that the Bulldogs might use, minor points that might help the Lions slow down Swain. Nweke said the small details can add up.
“Definitely knowing about the style of play [helps], but there’s no answer for Azar Swain coming in and heating up for 37, you know what I mean?” Carberry said. “So while I feel like I have a decent handle, obviously they put in more stuff this year that makes them difficult to be scouted, but we’re dealing with some talented players that our young guys have to get accustomed to being ready — right from jump ball — to defend.”
In an interview with the News before Yale’s originally scheduled Ivy opener with Columbia at the turn of the year, Columbia head coach Jim Engles joked that he was looking for even more intel.
“I’ve tried to give him extra special Christmas presents and stuff for New Years but he won’t give it up,” Engles said. “So James Jones taught him very well.
“If we win, I’m gonna take credit,” Engles added jokingly. “If we lose, I’m gonna blame it on Tobe.”
In addition to being familiar with the veterans on Yale’s roster, Carberry played a role recruiting most of the current rookies, including starting forward and fellow Connecticut native Matt Knowling ’24 along with his sophomore classmates, who started their first semester at Yale the same month that Carberry officially began with the Lions in August 2020. Carberry had conversations with Yale’s first-year point guard Bez Mbeng ’25 when he worked at Yale and then continued to recruit Mbeng once he started with Columbia.
Carberry was on the Yale coaching staff for two Ivy League championships, a trip to March Madness and even a weeklong journey to China, where the Bulldogs opened their 2018–19 season against Cal in the 2018 Pac-12 China Game. He considers those moments bonding experiences and said he still has “a lot of love and admiration for the coaching staff.”
With both hailing from Connecticut, Carberry has known Yale associate head coach Matt Kingsley since he was a young teenager. Now their sons are friends. He said he considers Jones a “big brother.” Carberry has kept up with his former colleagues, but said most of their conversations center around their personal lives and families as opposed to Ivy League hoops or upcoming matchups.
“My three years working and seeing [Jones] in his role just performing as a head coach day in and day out [and] the consistency to what he was doing … was the best thing that could ever happen for me for three years,” said Carberry, who added he aspires to be a head coach one day.
At Yale, Carberry served as the Bulldogs’ third assistant behind Kingsley and assistant coach Justin Simon ’04, a position that Jones said is technically volunteer for every team in the Ivy League at the time of Carberry’s departure. Carberry was instead paid through the program’s summer camp.
Before joining Yale, Carberry worked with the men’s basketball programs as an assistant coach at LIU Brooklyn, Central Connecticut, the University of New Haven and Southern Connecticut State.
Carberry scored 1,235 career points as a guard at Vermont before playing professional basketball in the NBA Development League — now G League — and Europe. As a college senior, he played at Yale in a November 1999 game that gave Jones his first career win as head coach.
