15th Season
Mercer County Community College men's basketball players may not realize their head coach Howard Levy is giving them a little piece of many great coaches. Nearly 25 years after finishing as Princeton’s career leader…Levy took over the Mercer men’s basketball program in 2008.
Levy has achieved this success with the Vikings, winning the Region 19 Championship in 2010 and advancing to the NJCAA Division II National Tournament in Danville, IL. Heading into his 15th season, Levy has 172 career wins, has coached 12 All-Region 19 players, 16 All Conference players and three All-Americans (Mustafa El-Amin, David Johnson and Donovon Guess).
Levy enjoyed a remarkable amount of success during the 2014-2015 season, when his team won 23 games for the first time since the 1997-1998 season when the team went 23-10. The 2014-2015 Vikings finished 23-4 and this was the first time a men's basketball team finished with this record since 1986-1987. The Vikings reached the 2015 Region 19 Championship but fell to Essex 54-73. The Vikings did finish as Garden State Athletic Champions for the 2014-2015 season. The 2014-2015 season also saw Mercer men's basketball earn their third All-American in the last fifteen years and second under Coach Levy, with David Johnson earning Second Team Division II Honors.
Levy played under Basketball Hall of Famer Pete Carril, former Princeton University Head Coach and Phil Jackson, a future Hall of Famer and current Head Coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, who has won a record 10 NBA Championships. Levy also coached alongside many other excellent coaches, including John Thompson III of Georgetown University, who began his coaching career at Princeton University.
Standing 6 feet, 10 inches, Levy is someone his players can look up to in more ways than one. As a center at Princeton, he starred for Carril on Ivy League Championship Teams in 1983 and 1984 and shot 64.7 percent over his career before he graduated with a Bachelors Degree in History in 1985. He then earned a gold medal as a member of the U.S. Team that traveled to Israel for the 1985 Maccabiah Games. After a tryout with the New Jersey Nets, he played for the Albany Patroons under Coach Phil Jackson in the old Continental Basketball Association. He later spent a year playing professionally in Australia.
Levy began his coaching career during the 1986-87 season at Trenton State College (now The College of New Jersey) before he spent three seasons from 1987-90 as an assistant coach at George Washington University while pursuing his law degree. He went on to serve as a Volunteer Assistant Coach at Princeton for 11 seasons from 1996-2007, when the Tigers appeared in four NCAA tournaments and three NITs.
The Princeton resident is the president and co-founder of Hypnotic Hats, Inc., a successful New York-based apparel and accessories company. He and his wife, Riva, have two daughters, Mia and Noa, and a son, Lior.