Abby Steiner

Steiner grew up in the Columbus suburb of Dublin, Ohio, concentrating mainly on soccer, only starting to run track in the eighth grade. She starred in both sports at Dublin Coffman High School. Though sidelined for most of a year by a torn ACL, she was an all-state soccer player while setting four state high school records and winning 14 individual and 2 relay state championships in track. Steiner was a dual-sport scholarship athlete at the University of Kentucky (UK), starting her college career in 2018 as both a soccer player and track athlete.

After a freshman soccer season in 2018 in which she started all 19 games for UK, scoring two goals and recording five assists, Steiner left soccer to concentrate on track full-time. In a 2022 interview for the Lexington Herald-Leader, the daily newspaper of UK's home city of Lexington, Steiner cited this decision as a key to her track development: Before, with soccer, I'd be training soccer in the fall, then I would come to track. I think really allowing myself to dive fully into the process of the periodization of training that we do, so fall training and then going into indoor and outdoor, it's all really important in developing speed and getting to where you want to be.