Coach Abe introduced as the new women’s baskeball coach

   Katie Abrahamson-Henderson was happy to add several new members to her extended basketball family last Monday when she was introduced as the new head coach for the women’s basketball team.

   It took 42 days for a search committee led by Assistant Athletic Director for Facilities, Scheduling and Game Management Cara White to sort through just under 150 candidates, four of whom visited the campus, to find the team’s new coach – “Coach Abe.”

   Coach Abe brings with her a 95-61 overall record from her five years as head coach with Missouri State from 2002-07 – a span that included three conference championships and NCAA tournament appearances in her first four years as coach – and she hopes to bring more of this to her new family, the Great Danes.

   “There are three main points to my philosophy: family first, academics second and basketball [third],” Abrahamson-Henderson said in last Monday’s press conference. “Family first meaning our basketball family, our university family [and] our athletic department family. There are so many types of families in this world today. We’re going to work like a family, and we are going to communicate a lot.

   “We are going to have a lot of team meetings. We are going to have a lot of individual talks. We’re going to learn to talk through the roof. We’re going to learn to speak the truth and talk to each other using real words and maybe have arguments like real families do.”

   Coach Abe’s coaching career also includes being an assistant coach for Duquesne where she began in 1990 and another assistant job at America East rival Maine from 1992-1994. For the last two years she has spent time as an associate head coach for Indiana University.

   Now, Coach Abe is looking to improve a team that was 11-19 and only won four of its 16 conference games in the 2009-10 season, however she stresses that basketball comes after family and academics.

   “I know from being a coach if our family and their family or our basketball family is not doing ok, and academics is not doing ok, when I get on the basketball floor, I’m not going to have them 100 percent,” she said. “I just know that from experience that if those two things, family and academics, aren’t 100 percent and aren’t feeling good, the amount of pressure I am going to be putting on them on the basketball court every day is going to be really tough.”

   Kim Clements, who will be just one of two seniors on the team next season, is glad with the decision to make Abrahamson-Henderson the new coach.

   “I love her energy,” Clements said. “[And] she comes from a basketball family. As a team we’re just all excited for that.”

   Clements was unable to meet with her in person when the rest of the team did initially but said the team was really happy with Coach Abe after the meeting.

   “The team, right after the meeting, they called me and said how much they loved her and her energy and her vibe,” Clements said. “Everybody’s really excited.”

   Coach Abe has a lot of time left to get more comfortable with her players before the season starts this fall.

   On the men’s side of things, Coach Will Brown took his name out of the running for the vacant Dartmouth coaching position and said he is happy at UAlbany.