The WNBA dream fell through, but Anne O’Neil hit the ground running, landing an assistant coaching job at Eastern Illinois University, with a little help from her former coach.

“[ISU coach Bill Fennelly] definitely didn’t have to convince me; I’ve been a big fan of hers for a long time,” said EIU coach Brady Sallee, O’Neil’s new boss.

“I had a spot open for someone who was looking to get into the game, and I asked if Coach Fennelly had any names, and he said he has the perfect name — Anne O’Neil.”

After being drafted by the Sacramento Monarchs in the third round of the WNBA draft, O’Neil went to California with every intention of making the team. Unfortunately, she was still playing on a stress fracture in her foot and was waived May 6, less than a month after being drafted.

“After I was out in Sacramento, my main concern was to get healthy, and that took until about July to be fully healthy,” O’Neil said.

“I was thinking about going overseas; I did have an agent. But I was feeling good about being done with my career after my great senior year at Iowa State.”

A year which included a 15-point, 8-rebound and 5-assist performance against the school she now works for.

“At the end of the summer, she really decided she had a lot of options on which way to go and made the decision to coach,” Fennelly said.

“It happened pretty quickly — not many people come right out of college with a full-time coaching job at the D-1 level.”

The Eastern Illinois women’s basketball team has traveled to Ames for the past two seasons, giving O’Neil some first-hand experience with the girls she will be coaching.

“I recognized a few of them; I haven’t gone over the game film of when we played them,” O’Neil said.

“I’m just really excited about it, especially being right out of college and getting such a great job.”

That great job is going to take a lot of work, though, to improve the Panthers mediocre record.

In Sallee’s first year as head coach, EIU ran up a 10-17 record, its first season with double-digit wins since 1998.

“I inherited a pretty rough deal, and we’ve got some work to do,” Sallee said.

“I like our staff right now, and we’re headed in the right direction. I think hiring Anne was a step in that direction.”

Sallee also mentioned the recruiting help he hopes to get with O’Neil’s name, bringing in some Iowa high school girls to help build his program. Fennelly doesn’t think that will be hard.

“[Sallee] is a really good young coach — it’s his first head-coaching job — and they were really well coached when they came here,” he said.

“[The Ohio Valley Conference is] a good league; they’re in a good position to move up.”

And Sallee said he is expecting O’Neil to be a big part of that and to show the team what it takes to play at a Division I level at a national program like Iowa State, versus how it has been played at Eastern Illinois the past few years.

“It’s neat because I can be on the floor coaching and teaching and also do some recruiting,” O’Neil said.

“I just ask people to call me Anne, though, I’m not used to ‘coach.'”