Head Coach Abe Woldeslassie ’08 gathered the men’s basketball team into the athletics conference room on Wednesday, April 23. In his hand, he held a picture of himself in his cap and gown at his Macalester graduation 17 years ago. There, in the same room he had met the first team he coached, he broke the news: after seven years of coaching at Macalester, Woldeslassie is moving on.
The next day, Macalester Athletics announced that Woldeslassie will leave his alma mater for an assistant coach position at the Division I University of Denver with new Pioneers Head Coach Tim Bergstraser, the former head coach of the Division II Minnesota State University Moorhead.
In his seven seasons at Mac, Woldeslassie compiled a 66-92 record, a profound resurgence after the ten years preceding him yielded a 35-215 record. Athletic Director Donnie Brooks has long known Woldeslassie was bound to ascend the coaching ranks beyond Macalester.
“The reality is, we’ve probably been on borrowed time [with Abe] since 2022 when we made it to the [conference] finals,” Brooks said. “There’s always been significant talk and interest in our head coach. I like to think that he’s one of the most popular people in college basketball. Everybody knows and loves Abe.”
Still, the decision to leave wasn’t easy for Woldeslassie. In the mid-2000s, then-Head Coach Curt Kietzer recruited the young Woldeslassie to play at Macalester. Though Kietzer convinced him that Mac was the best place for him, Woldeslassie wasn’t initially accepted. Instead, he played two years at University of St. Thomas before transferring in. When the young guard arrived at Macalester, Kietzer put him in games right away.
“I’m not the biggest guy, I’m not the most athletic guy, but he saw something in me, enough to give me an opportunity to play,” Woldeslassie said. “I was very proud that I started all 50 games that I played here.”
Kietzer’s trust in Woldeslassie’s abilities paid off: 17.2 points and 5.4 assists per game, good enough to lead the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC) in assists and earn him All-MIAC honors in both of his seasons with Mac.
In the ten years that followed, while Mac played dismal basketball, Woldeslassie built his career in college hoops; he worked as an assistant coach and director of basketball operations at schools at all different levels. He started at D-III Bowdoin College before he left for Dartmouth College in the Ivy League. Then, he leapt to D-I athletics at Davidson College before he became an assistant coach at Siena College.
One day while he was at Siena, a friend told him the head coaching position had opened up at Macalester. Woldeslassie, who had stayed connected with the program since his graduation, decided that it was time for a homecoming, and then-Athletic Director Kim Chandler agreed. In 2018, he came to the helm of the same program that he’d fought to attend over a decade before.
When he arrived as head coach, Woldeslassie sat down with his players in the athletics conference room and outlined his goal for the team: “Every senior class [will] take it further than the previous class.”
Until injuries derailed the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, Woldeslassie’s teams lived up to that aspiration. He took a team that had gone 3-22 in the 2017-18 season and led them to a 7-18 record in his first season. In 2022, he piloted them to the sixth seed in the MIAC playoffs, where they reached the MIAC Championship game for the second time in Scots history.
The next year, his program achieved 11 wins in the conference, the most since the 2003-04 season and the second Scots’ MIAC playoff berth during his tenure, two of the five appearances in that tournament that this team has ever made.
He recruited seven All-MIAC players. The most significant of those included Caleb Williams ’24, a three-time All-MIAC and All-Region guard, and Badou Ba ’25, the 2023 MIAC Defensive Player of the Year.
One of his most notable contributions to athletics off the court was a big one: a new athletic director. During those ten years away from Mac, Woldeslassie had worked with Brooks at Dartmouth College. When Chandler left Mac, Woldeslassie told Brooks to apply for the athletic director position. Once Brooks arrived at Macalester, he realized how extensive Woldeslassie’s vision for the athletics department was.
“If you see a lot of the changes in facility and branding, a lot of that happened because of Abe,” Brooks said. “[He] would go across the country, and every time he went into a facility, he’d take pictures, and he’d send me those pictures as a nudge to say, ‘Look at what these other folks were doing.’”
Woldeslassie connects with everyone, which Brooks calls his “superpower.” He considers the coach a friend, a sentiment which Director of Sports Information Matt McLagan expressed as well.
“He’s become my friend over these six, seven years,” McLagan said. “I see him every day. He comes in, and he talks to me about his team every day. It’s going to be hard to not have him do that. It’s actually hitting me right now, to be honest. But just a good guy and a great, great ambassador for Macalester.”
That connectivity extended beyond the walls of the Leonard Center (LC) that Woldeslassie loves so much. He reached out to local businesses; he put up posters in the windows of shops along Grand Ave and built a friendship with the owner of Shish. He developed a network of coaches, players, alums and fans in the Twin Cities and across the country. When he made his departure public, that network revealed its full extent.
“He said [all the call’s he’s received have] just been crazy,” McLagan said. “And I said, ‘You know, it’s your fault.’ You go through your life and you connect with everybody you possibly can, and this is the result. When … somebody sees the news, either Instagram or Twitter or wherever we posted it, where they saw it or they heard it, they’re like, ‘Abe — I know that guy. I think I’ll give him a call.’”
Woldeslassie’s departure from the program leaves the athletics department with a legacy to maintain. His career marks the highest peak the program has seen since Kietzer’s tenure, but those are two spikes for a team that has flatlined for most of its history. After Kietzer suffered a 33-game losing streak to end his coaching career, his replacement, Tim Whittle, failed to resurrect the Scots, leading to that 35-win decade.
Brooks has already hired seven new head coaches during his Mac career. Now, he starts a national search for his eighth. He knows the stakes of this pick: the wrong coach could tank what Woldeslassie has built. But the right one could prompt even more progress.
“[The next coach should] believe that they can do something that’s never been done before,” Brooks said. “I want a coach who thinks that they can out-recruit and out-coach Abe in this next job. Abe built a really solid foundation. So, the next coach [for] Macalester is going to understand that the table is set: the foundation’s there. The job now is to take us to the NCAA tournament.”
In March, former Mac Assistant Coach Niko Medved became head coach of University of Minnesota men’s basketball. Woldeslassie’s position at Denver could prepare him for a similar trajectory.
His former coach, Kietzer, summarized it best in an email to The Mac Weekly: “I would not put any limits on what Abe can achieve on his coaching journey. He has the knowledge, experience, temperament and work ethic [to] rise to the highest level and accomplish anything. The sky is the limit!”
While the athletics department will miss Woldeslassie’s coaching acumen, his personality and presence will leave a wider chasm in the office. Brooks and McLagan will lose not only a colleague but a friend.
It’s the little moments they’ll mourn the most. McLagan recalled how Woldeslassie would visit his office before each game. He would take a marker and scrawl on McLagan’s whiteboard his three “Keys to the Game,” the critical points he thought would define the day’s match.
“I don’t know if he [ever] missed a game,” McLagan said. “At least these last three or four years, he’s done that. He would be really busy and running around, and he would come in here, grab a marker, say, ‘I got to do this fast,’ and I’m like, ‘You don’t even have to do it.’ And he was like, ‘No, I want to do it,’ and he’d write all three down, and then we’d talk about it a little bit, and then he’d run off and do what he had to do.”
The national search for Woldeslassie’s replacement is underway. Though he’s still in the office, he’ll soon depart for Colorado. A fresh coaching staff and roster mean a new horizon for a team in need of a turnaround in the Summit League, but making those improvements will take effort. Not that Woldeslassie is unaccustomed to turning teams around.
Even as he prepares to leave, visit Woldeslassie’s office and ask him about his playing days at Mac, and he will say how he lived out his basketball dreams. He has his roots in the team even though he never got to play in today’s LC. He’ll even stand on his desk to reach up to the top shelf and bring down a chunk of basketball court with Macalester’s logo inscribed in it above “August 28, 2008,” the date of the LC’s debut.
As he holds it proudly, he’ll say how the new athletics center wasn’t finished until the fall after he graduated, but in a charitable twist of fate, he got the chance for seven years to live out his LC dreams with the Scots as their head coach. Now, that dream has finished. He has coached his final game on the Doug Bolstorff Court.
“What I told our players was that I’m so proud to be a Macalester grad,” Woldeslassie said. “I’m a Macalester grad forever. My hope is that they’ll be able to say the same thing. And I can still support the program, even though I’m not the head coach.”
*Anya Armentrout contributed reporting to this article
