1st Year
Univ. of Michigan '04
Annessa Steele joined the Edinboro coaching staff in July 2019. Track & field head coach/director of cross country operations Anne Cleary announced Steele was joining her staff as an assistant with both programs. She will specifically work with the mid-distance group in track & field.
Steele joins Edinboro after previously serving as the head track & field coach at Butler (Pa.) High School from 2009-13. She led the Tornado to back-to-back WPIAL championships in 2010 and 2011 while overseeing a program that included 12 assistant coaches and 500 male and female competitors.
"I am excited to join Coach Cleary and Coach Foster as the assistant cross country and track & field coach," commented Steele. "We are a young staff that shares the same core values that grow programs into championship teams. I'm ready to get to work fostering the development of each student-athlete and I am excited for the future of Edinboro Track & Field and Cross Country."
A 2004 graduate of the University of Michigan with a bachelor's degree in Secondary Education and a double major in English and Psychology, Steele was a Big Ten Scholar-Athlete in both track & field and cross country. She was a five-time Big Ten team champion (indoor and outdoor) from 2002-2004, and a member of the first Big Ten women's track & field team to win three consecutive outdoor championships.
Steele competed in the heptathlon for the Wolverines, and was a legendary athlete while competing at Butler. She was inducted into the Butler County Athletic Hall of Fame in 2015, and in 2017 into the WPIAL Athletic Hall of Fame. During her career at Butler, she was a ten-time WPIAL individual champion in five different events. She earned seven PIAA state medals and qualified for four events all four years. She earned her highest finish in 1998 and 1999, coming in third in the 400-meters. She held the WPIAL record in that event for nine years. All told, she lettered in five different sports – track & field, cross country, basketball, soccer, and tennis.
Following her graduation from Michigan, she would go on to earn her master's degree in Secondary English Education from Slippery Rock, and she is currently working on her doctorate in Special Education from Slippery Rock.
Steele was a teacher in the Butler Area School District from 2005 to 2017, serving as an 11th grade English teacher. Since 2017, she has been a full-time educator in the department of Middle and Secondary Education and Education Leadership at Edinboro.
