Rich Agnello

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Rich Agnello’s soccer background for his latest novel Adoring Andy goes back to a visit from Charlie Mitchell of his hometown Rochester Lancers of the American Soccer League to his upstate New York parochial school when he was only twelve years old, but it also extends through four years of play for Bishop Kearney High School in nearby Irondequoit, three years of competition with Marquette University, and fifteen years in boys’ select youth soccer coaching in Rochester, Dallas, and Raleigh. During his soccer tenure, Agnello also attended the USSF C, D, and E coaching schools, as well as participated in a tryout session for the Dallas Sidekicks of the Major Indoor Soccer League.

These accomplishments came from a mainly second-string athlete who started only two games at the high school junior varsity level throughout all his playing days, and a select level youth soccer coach who never received a single yellow or red card in fifteen years on the sidelines.

Adoring Andy applies this soccer background to Rich Agnello’s expertise in virtue-based Catholic writing and lay Catholic theology. His Little League Baseball/behavioral health novel Going to Williamsport was a 2023 Sports category finalist in the American Fiction Awards. Additionally, Agnello’s children’s short story What Do I Do With Dewey? merited Semifinalist status in the 2022 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Competition, and likewise, his young adult jazz novel based on a teaching of Mother Teresa, Jojay and the Joy of Anyway, was recognized as a 2025 Quarterfinalist in the ScreenCraft Cinematic Prose competition.

He is also the author of the Catholic Lector training and spirituality guide Our Marian Pulpit: From a Lector’s Soul House that is based on more than fifty years in this liturgical ministry, and the spiritual preparation book for the Sacrament of Penance A Tenth Station Confession.

Moreover, Agnello’s feature editorials and letters to the editor have been published in eleven newspapers across six states, and his poetic tribute to the victims of the Uvalde, Texas tragedy, Where Did You Go, Olivia Uvalde?, was published online in the Fall 2024 edition of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Arts and Sciences (PJAS).

Rich Agnello is a native of Webster, New York just east of Rochester, and a graduate of Marquette University (BA Speech cum laude, 1978), the University of Denver (MPA Public Administration, 1981), and several certifications, including the PMP, ITIL, CTAL-TM, and CTFL designations, as well as Outward Bound West in the Gila Wilderness near San Lorenzo, New Mexico.

Agnello retired in 2022 following seven years in the Federal government and thirteen years with Hewlett-Packard/Electronic Data Systems, and he resides in Worthington, Ohio north of Columbus with his wife of twenty-five years Theresa (Cecil) Agnello.

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