Rachel Balkovec will manage the low-A team for the New York Yankees this season, making her the first female skipper in affiliated professional baseball, according to a report by The Athletic.
Balkovec, who joined the Yankees as a minor league hitting coach in November 2019, will lead the minor league Tampa Tarpons, according to The Athletic.
A 34-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, Balkovec 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 master’s degree at Vrije University in the Netherlands, where she also worked with the country’s national baseball and softball teams. She then worked for Driveline Baseball, a data-driven baseball center that has trained numerous major leaguers, before being hired by New York.
“I view my path as an advantage,” Balkovec told The Associated Press in 2019. “I had to do probably much more than maybe a male counterpart, but I like that because I’m so much more prepared for the challenges that I might encounter.”
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.