WOODSTOCK — Timmy MacDonnell graduated from college in 2010, at the tail end of the Great Recession, and struggled to find a job.
Like many of his peers, MacDonnell returned to his parents’ home in Jericho, Vt. to figure out his next steps, which led him back to his high school alma mater, Mount Mansfield Union, to run a study hall program.
MacDonnell had played basketball at MMU, winning VPA Division I state championships in 2004 and 2005, then continued his basketball career with the Division III program at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. So when his high school coach, Jeff Davis, found out MacDonnell was back at Mount Mansfield, he offered him a volunteer assistant coaching position.
The rest is history — MacDonnell has been a teacher ever since while coaching on the side nearly the entire time, save for the last two years due to COVID-19 and the births of his two children. But now he is back on the bench for a second stint leading the Woodstock High girls, having previously coached the Wasps in the 2016-17 season.
“I was trying to figure out my next move professionally, and I started working with Jeff and found out I really liked teaching and working with high school kids,” MacDonnell said. “I went back to school to get my teaching degree and my certificate, and have coached pretty much since then.”
Working under Davis while pursuing his teaching degree remotely, MacDonnell helped the Cougars win another state title in 2012. After that, he got his first full-time teaching job in Springfield, Vt., working in the math department and coaching at all levels of the basketball program, including as varsity boys head coach for one year.
Woodstock finished 8-13 under MacDonnell in 2017, falling in the Division II first round to Lyndon. Following that season, MacDonnell was hired as a math teacher at Hartford High and stepped away from the Woodstock job, wanting to teach and coach at the same place. He was an assistant for the Hartford boys for the next three years until the pandemic hit in 2020.
“I definitely had the itch to get back into coaching. It’s a passion of mine, blending working with high school kids and basketball,” MacDonnell said. “The opportunity at Woodstock came up, and my wife and I had a bunch of conversations, and she knows it’s important to me.”
MacDonnell and Woodstock athletic director Jack Boymer have become friends over the years from playing in men’s leagues together, so when the Wasps’ job opened again this past offseason, Boymer approached MacDonnell about a return.
It’s no secret Woodstock has long been a hard place to win on the hardwood. The school’s enrollment places it at the small end of Division II for the VPA’s purposes, and hockey has long been the more popular winter sport. While the Wasps’ girls were winning the school’s first state title on the ice last winter, the basketball team went 5-16.
No head coach in the last decade has spent more than two years with Woodstock, a program that has never reached the state semifinals and last experienced a winning season and a playoff victory in 2004.
“It’s certainly a challenge,” Boymer said. “It’s always a goal to build a culture with a consistent person at the helm, and obviously that has not taken place in the last decade or so in the girls basketball program. For new coaches coming on, there’s always going to be growing pains in a new situation. We’d prefer to have long-term coaches, but it doesn’t always work out that way.”
This year’s Wasps have just three players back from last year’s team, coached by Dennis Wood. But MacDonnell’s new-look squad, which has moved down to Division III for the first time in program history, opened the season with a comfortable 47-23 win over Mill River on Monday night. Woodstock was led by two of those three returnees — junior Georgia Tarleton scored 12 points and senior Norah Harper added 10.
On Saturday, MacDonnell will coach against some of his students as the Wasps visit rival Hartford for the first of two meetings with the Hurricanes in a seven-day span. MacDonnell’s wife, Annie Doton-MacDonnell, is also on the Hartford faculty as a social studies teacher.
MacDonnell said the awkwardness of facing the school at which he is employed should be minimal — he is, after all, a teacher on the basketball court as well as in the classroom.
“He’s very clear and concise. He’s been able to take the team leaps and bounds in a pretty short amount of time, through his knowledge of the game,” Boymer said. “He’s a teacher at heart. He really knows how to teach the game and teach his players the ins and outs of basketball.”
Benjamin Rosenberg can be reached at brosenberg@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.