Georgia coach off to fast start
Georgia head women’s basketball coach Katie Abrahamson-henderson has won 20 games coaching in her first season in the Southeastern Conference. She has made her presence known in college basketball’s premier conference.
On Sunday against undefeated and top-ranked South Carolina, the Lady Bulldogs lost 73-63 in front of a sold-out crowd of 18,000 in Columbia.
Georgia entered the game on a roll, winning five straight conference matchups heading into Sunday’s final game of the season and conference championship play. LSU’S coach Kim Mulkey said after a recent loss to the Gamecocks, “It’s South Carolina, in my opinion, and everyone else,” but Abrahamson-henderson refused to place the Gamecocks on a pedestal.
“We have bigs and not everyone has that,” she said in a telephone interview prior to the game. “Now everyone else is using our game plan. Which is fine.”
In both regular season matchups with the Gamecocks, the Lady Bulldogs rose to the occasion. They led at halftime during a home 68-51 loss on Jan. 2 and kept the game close Sunday in hostile Colonial Life Arena on the Gamecock’s senior night celebrating Aliyah Boston and the class of 2019.
“They’re fearless. My teams are always fearless,” she said.
Abrahamson-henderson, known as Coach Abe, made her mark at Ualbany, earning the school’s first women’s basketball NCAA Tournament win against Florida in 2016.
In Abrahamson-henderson’s tenure, Ualbany players set numerous new program records. Ebone Henry, the 2012-13 America East Player of the Year, finished her career with 1,642 points from 2009-13. Ebone Henry Harris, the married mom of three children, serves as the Georgia Lady Bulldogs’ Director of Player Development.
“Ebone is a fantastic mom,” Abrahamson-henderson said. “We were just talking about Shereesha Richards today. I miss that kid. We played against a player at Auburn who reminded us of Shereesha.”
Richards became the leading scorer in Ualbany basketball history with 2,440 career points from 2012-16.
Coach Abe was named head
coach of Georgia in March 2022 after leading the University of Central Florida in Orlando to the round of 32 last season. Again, it was a win over Florida that gave Abrahamson-henderson and UCF a coveted firstround win in the NCAA Tournament.
But soon after the NCAA Tournament, the Georgia job opened up and Abrahamson henderson was hired to return to the school where she played two years of collegiate basketball.
“I really had to re-recruit the players who stayed and show them our vision of what we were going to do,” she said.
Anchored by UCF players who followed her to Georgia along with a solid class of incoming freshmen and portal transfers, she patched together a team in her debut season with the Lady Bulldogs.
“I was trying to blend all those cultures, four cultures, together. At the beginning it was really hard,” she said.
Now the team sits at 20-10 overall, 9-7 in the SEC. On the bubble at the moment for an NCAA Tournament at-large bid,
Abrahamson-henderson anticipates a highly competitive conference tournament.
“I think everybody’s really settled in on their roles now. It just took a while,” she said.
Prior to this season, in 17 seasons as a head coach, Abrahamson-henderson’s teams compiled a 372-157 record — a 70 percent win percentage and an average of 22 victories per year, according to her Lady Bulldogs profile. Her teams have earned seven conference regular-season titles, nine league tournament crowns, 11 NCAA Tournament berths and 14 postseason bids overall. Her Missouri State team won the 2005 WNIT championship.