Anjanette Whitman
“I view the high school athletic arena as a training tool for life. I tell my student-athletes to think of being on the team as a four-year interview where you get to learn how to produce results beyond the athletic experience. My responsibility is to teach our youth forward-thinking and problem-solving skills that will help them in every aspect of their lives now and into the future. I joined PCA to help other coaches do the same and to learn from them as well.”
Anjanette Whitman is the head cross country and track & field coach at Lutheran West High School which is in Rocky River, Ohio just west of Cleveland, Ohio. Anjanette has been coaching for a total of 21 years. She has her USATF Level 2 certification in the areas of endurance, sprints, relays, hurdles and jumps.
Anjanette has led cross country teams to the Ohio High School State meet every season from 2004 to 2011 and outside of those years coached individual State qualifiers in 2002, 2003, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018 & 2019. The 2009 team set a new State Meet record low score for all divisions of ladies in Ohio of only 28 points. That team also competed at the Nike Cross National Championships in Portland, Oregon in 2008 & 2009, finishing 5th in 2009. Overall, she has coached 4 State Champion Teams, 2 State Runner-Up Teams and 5 Conference Championship Teams. A total of 37 of her athletes she have competed at the collegiate level.
Anjanette graduated from Rocky River High School in 1991 where she was the Division II 1600m State Champion her senior year. She went on to graduate from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in American Government. She competed with her team at the 1993 NCAA Cross Country Championship Meet and was All-ACC in the 3,000m in track. After graduating from UVA, she continued her running career at the Olympic Development Level and then coupled it with coaching while she was in law school at Cleveland Marshall College of Law. In her career path in the legal community she has been a private family law attorney, a judge at the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court and a trial magistrate at the Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court. Currently, she is the Director of the Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court Help Center which serves over 9,000 self-represented litigants each year.