Vassar College Athletics

JJ Hoffstein was named the assistant coach for the Brewers women's basketball team in June 2020. He also serves as a facilities assistant for the Vassar Athletics Department.

In his second season with the Brewers in 2021-22, Hoffstein helped head coach Anthony Mason guide the squad to a 17-8 overall record, going 16-2 in Liberty League play. The squad went 16-1 from December 3, 2021 through February 18, 2022 with all but one game coming against league opponents. Vassar led the Liberty League in a number of categories, including assist to turnover ratio (1.20), fewest turnovers (277), free throw percentage (75.3%), scoring offense (70.2), Three-Point Field Goals Attempted (896), Three-Point Field Goals Made (265), Three-Point Field Goals per Game (10.6) and turnover margin (10.04). 

Individually, the Brewers saw several players rank among the Liberty League's best at season's end, including Sarah Gillooly '22, who led the league in assists (101), assists per game (4.0) and assist to turnover ratio (2.40). Additionally, Dani Douglas '22 led the league in minutes played (862:30), Three-Point Field Goals Attempted (242), Three-Point Field Goals Made (89), Three-Point Field Goals per Game (3.56) and Three-Point Field Goal Percentage (36.8), while Eliza Srinivasan '23 was second in both assists (97) and steals per game (2.0).

The year-end honors were plentiful for the Brewers in 2021-22 as Gillooly was named the Liberty League Player of the Year, while Srinivasan was tabbed the league's Defensive Player of the Year. Both Gillooly and Douglas were All-Liberty League First Team selections, while Mason and Hoffstein were voted by the league's coaches as the 2021-22 Liberty League Coaching Staff of the Year.
 
Hoffstein came to Vassar following a two-year stint as the graduate assistant women's basketball coach at Smith College.
 
During his tenure at Smith, the Pioneers went 48-11 overall. The team won their first-ever NEWMAC Championship, and advanced to their first-ever NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 before their season was cut short due to the pandemic. Hoffstein also helped guide the squad to the NEWMAC Semifinals and the NCAA Tournament Second Round the prior year. He also coached back-to-back NEWMAC Players of the Year and numerous All-Conference selections while at Smith. Throughout, he was heavily involved in the program's recruiting efforts.
 
Hoffstein takes pride in bringing an analytical approach to his coaching. He built his own basketball statistics database, which he calls "the kenpom.com of DIII women's basketball" and uses it to inform how he produces scouting reports, analyzes video, conducts player workouts, and performs other coaching tasks. Hoffstein enjoys finding marginal efficiencies in everything he does and believes that understanding the mathematics of basketball is critical to any program's success.

Prior to his time at Smith, Hoffstein spent nearly four years as a finance associate at Goldman Sachs in New York City. While at Goldman, he worked on liquidity risk management, asset-liability management, and firm-wide committee governance as a member of the Corporate Treasury department.
 
A 2014 graduate of Amherst College, Hoffstein majored in Economics and served as a student assistant basketball coach on the Amherst women's basketball team during his senior year. That season, Amherst posted a 26-4 record, making it to the NESCAC Finals and to the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16. As a student assistant, Hoffstein was involved in every part of the program, and took particular pleasure in generating pace-adjusted player and team efficiency statistics to aid coaching decisions.  
  
Hoffstein has also worked with a number of organizations over the past few summers, including the Gregg Downer Basketball Camp in Pennsylvania and the African School for Excellence during the Summer of 2012 in South Africa. In that post, he helped organize and run a start-up 3-week pilot school for 160 students, teaching an entrepreneurship and mathematics curriculum to three classes.
 
Hoffstein earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Amherst College in 2014, and a Master of Science in Exercise & Sports Studies from Smith College in 2020.