Rachel Balkovec, 32, has joined the New York Yankees as the first female minor-league hitting coach hired by a Major League Baseball team, reports The New York Times.
Balkovec signed a contract Nov. 8 and reports to Tampa, Fla., on Feb. 1 to take on her role as roving instructor.
"It's an easy answer to why we chose Rachel for this role," Yankees hitting coordinator, Dillon Lawson, told the Times. "She's a good hitting coach, and a good coach, period."
Balkovec, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, was a catcher on the softball teams at Creighton University and New Mexico. She earned her master's degree in kinesiology from Louisiana State University in 2012 and another master's in human movement sciences at Vrije University in the Netherlands about six years later.
Balkovec is not new to the majors. She worked for the St. Louis Cardinals on a temporary contract in 2012 as a strength and conditioning coach for their affiliate in Johnson City, Tennessee, and was chosen as the minor-league strength and conditioning coordinator for the team for the 2014-15 season.
She also worked as the Astros' Latin American strength and conditioning coach in 2016 and, in 2018, became the strength and conditioning coach for the Double-A Corpus Christi Hooks.
"I knew my passion was shifting from solely strength and conditioning to a more global view of the game, and I wanted to be able to have a bigger impact on player development by helping them get better from a scientific perspective," Balkovec said. "It's obvious the direction in which the game is headed, and I knew getting a better grasp of the research and analytics side of things would only be beneficial for my future in baseball."
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