Rachel Balkovec to become first female manager of a minor-league team

New York — According to two people familiar with the move, the New York Yankees are promoting Rachel Balkovec to manager of the Low A Tampa Tarpons, making her the first woman to skipper a team affiliated with Major League Baseball.

Balkovec got her first position in pro ball with the St. Louis Cardinals as a minor league strength and conditioning coach in 2012. She joined the Yankees organization as a hitting coach in 2019, making her the first woman with that job full-time in affiliated baseball.

In 2016, a 34-year-old Balkovec, a former softball catcher at Creighton University and the University of New Mexico, moved from the Cardinals to the Houston Astros.

Balkovec 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.

In 2018 she left baseball 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. Later, she 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,” she said 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.”