One of the winningest coaches in college tennis history and the longest-tenured coach at Columbia, Bid Goswami served as the head coach for the Columbia men’s tennis team from 1982-2019.
Columbia finished Goswami’s 37th and final season as head coach as the Ivy League Champions for the sixth straight year. The Lions returned to the NCAA Sweet 16 for the fourth time in six seasons in 2019. The Lions defeated Bryant and Penn State in back-to-back 4-0 sweeps before falling in the Sweet 16 to Ohio State.
In his time leading the Lions, Goswami was responsible for coaching four All-Americans (Jeff Chiang – 1990; Winston Lin – 2014-15; Jack Lin - 2019), six Ivy League Players of the Year (Phil Williamson – 1987; Salil Seshadri – 1998; Oscar Chow – 2003; Winston Lin – 2014; Victor Pham – 2018, 2018) and four Ivy League Rookies of the Year (Jonathan Wong – 2007; Haig Schneiderman – 2009; Winston Lin – 2012; Dragos Ignat – 2013).
Goswami was also responsible for establishing Columbia men’s tennis as a national power. Goswami led the Lions to 15 Ivy League championships, the first coming in 1984. He won championships again in 1987 and 1994 before clinching back-to-back titles in 2000 and 2001. The Lions hoisted the trophy again in 2007 and went back-to-back again in 2009 and 2010. Goswami wrapped up an amazing career with six straight Ivy League championships from 2014-19.
Goswami was a two-time ITA Northeast Coach of the Year award winner in 2007 and 2014. Goswami was named the ITA National Coach of the Year in 2019 in his final season as head coach.
The winningest season under Goswami came during the 2014 season when Columbia went 22-2 in dual matches. The only team losses that season came against No. 3 Georgia at the ITA Kick-Off and the NCAA Championship to the eventual national champions, No. 1 USC. That season began a 28-match winning streak in the Ivy League, as Columbia went unbeaten in conference dual matches over 1,469 days. As a team, Columbia was ranked as high as No. 16 during the 2014 season, the highest-ever ranking in program history at the time.
Goswami had over 15 players go from Columbia to the professional tour, including Jeff Chiang, the 1990 Collegiate Senior Player of the Year; Phil Williamson, the 1987 EITA Player of the Year, and Rob Kresberg, who went on to become the women’s tennis coach at Columbia from 1994-2007.
A former touring pro, Goswami succeeded another ex-touring pro, Paul Gerken, in 1982. He was a member of the Indian Davis Cup squad in 1974-75 and won the Indian National Singles title in 1979 and the Doubles title in 1978.
A native of Assam, in the foothills of the Himalayas, Goswami earned a bachelor’s degree in business from St. Xavier’s College of Calcutta University in 1973 and competed for St. Xavier’s in tennis from 1970-73.
After leaving the tour, Goswami became a club professional and served as the director of tennis at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, from 1977-2012. Goswami and his wife, Anne, reside in South Salem, New York. Their son, Blaise, is a graduate of Princeton University and their daughter, Linnae, a graduate of Columbia College, is a former captain of the Lions’ women’s tennis team.
