LSU Graduate, First Female MLB Hitting Coach

[LSUDad]

LSU grad becomes first female MLB hitting coach

 

 

LSU grad Rachel Balkovec becomes Major League Baseball's first female hitting coach. (Source: New York Yankees)

By Amanda Lindsley | May 6, 2020 at 1:40 PM CDT - Updated May 6 at 5:35 PM 

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - LSU graduate Rachel Balkovec has become the first-ever female full-time hitting coach in Major League Baseball (MLB).

COVID-19 has the MLB season and Balkovec’s coaching duties on hold but she is using the extra time to help others.

“I’ve been in worse situations than I’ve been in now, and there are a lot of people who are struggling,” Balkovec said.

The Omaha, Neb. native earned her Master’s Degree in Sports Administration from LSU back in 2012.

“LSU had a huge impact on me. Starting out my career in LSU athletics really taught me what high level athletics is about, and what high standards are about in regards to performance,” Balkovec said.

Balkovec was coaching during spring training of her first season with the New York Yankees in Tampa, Fla. when the start of the season was delayed because of the coronavirus.

Rather than focus on only herself during this time, Balkovec decided to donate $5 a day to help people in need.

“It feels like a drop in the bucket,” Balkovec said. “I think sometimes we allow the problems in our lives, not just the coronavirus, to feel so big it just freezes us and we don’t do anything. Instead of not doing anything, I just wanted to do something that hopefully inspires others.”

She has also started a GoFundMe account which has raised more than $4,000.

“People are offering up advice and recommendations for which groups to help. So far, it’s been a couple of food banks. We’ve purchased medical supplies. This week, I’m donating to an organization that supports minor league baseball players,” she said.

Balkovec’s baseball career started off in the minors. After graduating from LSU she took an internship with the St. Louis Cardinals.

“I was with one of their rookie league teams as a strength and conditioning coach. When it ended, I moved to the Dominican Republic and worked with a winter baseball team,” Balkovec said.

After her year with the Cardinals was up she spent a year away from baseball looking for work. Balkovec soon found her way back to baseball by taking an internship with the Chicago White Sox’s, which then lead to her second job with the St. Louis Cardinals. She served as the Cardinals’ minor league strength and conditioning coordinator for two years.

“I was overseeing 250 athletes and 10 male strength coaches – that was one my biggest breaks in my career,” she said.

That was followed by three years with the Houston Astros as their Latin America strength and conditioning coordinator, and their double-A strength and conditioning coach.

“Then I quit at the end of 2018 and went back to school, this time to Amsterdam for a year and completed my research for that degree in Seattle. Then I was hired by the New York Yankees as a minor league hitting coach. It’s been quite a journey, a little bit different, but I wouldn’t take any of it back,” Balkovec said.

According to Balkovec, she faced gender discrimination along the way which encouraged her to work harder.

“Early on in my career it was kind of a necessity because of my gender. Understanding I was going to have to do a little bit more than others, which I’m fine with. It wasn’t always fun but I look back and I’m grateful that I did have to go above and beyond because I’m better for it now obviously,” Balkovec said.

Even though Balkovec is MLB’s first full-time female coach, she doesn’t consider herself a trailblazer.

“I’m not a pioneer. There are plenty of people who came before me, I always like to acknowledge that,” Balkovec said. “There were plenty of other women who set the stage for me to be able to have this opportunity before me. Like my own boss when I was at LSU, Melissa Moore Seal. When she got into strength and conditioning more than ten years ago, there were very few females doing it.”

Melissa Moore Seal, the assistant strength and conditioning coordinator for LSU Athletics, said she knew Balkovec would be successful.

It was evident that she was a talented coach and I definitely knew she had the qualities to be first. She always had a passion for baseball as a sport, she really enjoyed it,” Seal said.

Balkovec also works to help others prepare for their careers, through a program she started called the Virtual Handshake Academy.

“If you would have told me when I was at LSU that I would be a hitting coach for the New York Yankees one day, I would have said ‘What?!’ Just to think of what type of journey and different ways my career has taken me is crazy,” Balkovec said.

[LSUDad]

Not her first stop: 

Astros' female strength coach breaks barriers

Qualifications made strength coach 'must hire'

By Evan Drellich | on February 22, 2016

 

Photo: Karen Warren, Staff

Rachel Balkovec says players have been accepting of her as a strength and con-ditioning coordinator.

KISSIMMEE, Fla. - Some in Rachel Balkovec's family still call her "Rae," the gender-neutral shortening of her name she briefly used on résumés. Despite qualifications that should have quickly landed Balkovec a job in baseball, she found only dead ends because she was, well, a she. So "Rae" was a temporary workaround.

Now 28, Balkovec is entering her first year as the Astros' Latin America strength and conditioning coordinator. She landed with the Cardinals in 2013 as a minor league coordinator, becoming the first woman to be hired as a pro baseball strength and conditioning coach. (She was very close to joining the Astros back then, too, impressing two teams at once after so many passed.)

Before the Cardinals job, Balkovec had eight offers to work with NCAA Division I women's programs - but none for pro baseball teams. And that's where her heart was after playing softball.

Balkovec was in Phoenix, where half of MLB holds spring training, in 2013. She thought the baseball hotbed could lead to an open door. She wound up working at Lulu Lemon and waitressing at Hillstone. She interned at Arizona State for free before finally landing an Arizona Fall League internship with the White Sox. The pay was $30 a day.

You can call her Rae

One could see, therefore, why Balkovec at one point changed her résumé name to "Rae." And the résumé no longer read "NCAA Division I softball player." It read "NCAA Division I catcher," and she signed her emails "R. Balkovec."

By creating a document of gender neutrality, Balkovec thought, she might hear back. She was right.

"A guy called me one day," Balkovec said Sunday at the Astros' complex. "He was like, 'Hey, can I talk to Rae?' And I was like, 'Oh my God. It worked.' "

But she admits she wasn't thinking. Her greeting to the baseball person was a customary "This is she."

"And it was like the most awkward five seconds of my life. You could hear the rustling of papers in the background," Balkovec said, laughing. "He was like, 'Uh, I just want to make sure that I said your name right.' And I was like, I think there's only one way to say Rae. I didn't say that, but I was like, 'Oh my gosh.' "

Jake Beiting, the Astros' major league strength and conditioning coach, said Balkovec was probably the best interview he's ever had. The references, too, were glowing, be they from people who knew her in the Cardinals organization or from LSU, where she was a graduate assistant. Astros pitching coach Brent Strom was among those to put in a good word.

"We thought if she ever became available again, kind of a must hire," Beiting said. "Every variable outside of gender - she was a Division I college athlete that played the sport she wants to work with; she worked at an SEC school, huge college department with a very well-respected strength coach there as her mentor; the experience as a minor league coordinator - how could I not hire this person?"

Empowering others

Now that Balkovec has made it, she hasn't encountered the resistance in the places one might think. The players, she said, have been excellent to her. They respect her and see how hard she works.

Older baseball front-office folks are the ones who have proved occasionally troublesome, those who grew up in a time women were barely involved in the game in any way. The younger generation is more accepting.

Her greatest satisfaction comes not from witnessing a great play or athlete. It's from seeing someone grow - like the Latin player who can now name the basic body parts in English after her tutelage.

"Someone asked me what does it mean to be the first (woman in this role) the other day," Balkovec said. "I thought that was a great question. What it means to me is it's an opportunity to empower other people. And not just women, but other people - anybody who's up against something, anyone who's been discriminated against, anyone who has a big dream. It's an opportunity for me to stand as an idea that they can accomplish what they want to do.

"Making an impact on their lives personally, mentally, emotionally, helping them grow as young men, helping them become more educated and strive for more in life … that's why I'm doing this business."