NEW YORK: Rachel Balkovec became the first woman hired to manage a minor league affiliate of a Major League Baseball team when she was promoted Tuesday by the New York Yankees to dugout boss of the Low A Tampa Tarpons.
The 34-year-old joined the Yankees organization as a hitting coach in 2019, making her the first woman with that job full-time in affiliated baseball. She got her first position in pro ball with the St. Louis Cardinals as a minor league strength and conditioning coach in 2012.
Balkovec, a former softball catcher at Creighton and New Mexico, moved from the Cardinals to the Houston Astros in 2016. She was hired as the Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator, a position for which she learned Spanish, and later became the strength and conditioning coach at Double-A Corpus Christi.
She briefly left baseball in 2018 to pursue a second masters degree at Vrije University in the Netherlands, where she also worked with the countrys national baseball and softball teams. She then worked for Driveline Baseball, a data-driven center that has trained numerous major leaguers, before being hired by New York.
I view my path as an advantage, she told The Associated Press in 2019. I had to do probably much more than maybe a male counterpart, but I like that because Im so much more prepared for the challenges that I might encounter.
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