The Penn coaching carousel took another strange turn this weekend.
On Friday, Hartford named former Penn assistant coach John Gallagher as its newest men’s basketball coach after Dan Leibovitz offered his resignation. The same day, Penn announced that it had hired Leibovitz to the Penn assistant position vacated by none other than Gallagher.
“I could not be more excited to return to Penn,” Leibovitz, a 1996 Penn graduate, said in a statement. “A couple of days ago, I was walking onto the Palestra floor, thinking about being a part of the Big 5 again, about Penn being 10th in all-time wins and winning the Ivy League 25 times. By the time I reached midcourt, I knew that this is where I wanted to be.”
Though Leibovitz was seen to be a logical contender for the head coach job now occupied by Jerome Allen, he previously told The Daily Pennsylvanian that rumors claiming he was in Philadelphia to interview for the position were “ludicrous.”
Instead, he threw his support behind classmate Allen and now finds himself working for his old friend.
But Leibovitz’s connections to Allen extend beyond the three years the pair spent together on campus, and Leibovitz pointed to the pair’s relationship as a motivating factor in his decision to come to Penn.
“Jerome has been a great friend since high school, and I know he is destined to succeed as the head coach at Penn,” Leibovitz said in a statement. “The opportunity to help him realize his dreams while helping to restore such a storied tradition was something I just could not pass up.”
Allen and Leibovitz’s friendship began when the two played together at Episcopal Academy under coach Dan Dougherty. Leibovitz would return to his high school to begin his coaching career in 1994.
Two years later, he became an assistant coach at Temple under Basketball Hall of Fame inductee John Chaney. During his 10 years with the Owls, Leibovitz helped lead Temple to two Atlantic 10 conference championships and five NCAA tournament appearances.
At the end of the 2005-06 season, Leibovitz assumed the role of acting coach at Temple while Chaney served a self-imposed (and later university-sanctioned) suspension. Temple won three of its five games under Leibovitz and advanced to the National Invitation Tournament, where it lost in the first round.
The following year, when former Penn coach Fran Dunphy made the move to Temple, Leibovitz was tapped to become the head coach at Hartford.
In his four years with the Hawks, Leibovitz earned a 44-82 record. In the 2007-08 season, he led the Hawks to the final round of the America East tournament racking up an 18-16 record.
At Penn, Leibovitz will fill a recruiting role that was once occupied by Gallagher, who was the first to contact many of the members of Penn’s recruiting class.
Leibovitz’s resume suggests that he is fit for the challenge.
As a Temple assistant, he successfully recruited Los Angeles Clippers guard Mardy Collins as well as three-time Atlantic-10 leading scorer Dionte Christmas.
And in his four years at Hartford, Leibovitz secured four recruits from Pennsylvania, five from California, three from Texas and others from Puerto Rico, Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
“I think Dan’s resume speaks for itself in this profession,” Allen said in a statement. “To have him on our staff is great, I could not ask for a better person in that spot.”
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