I get to coach.
That was Bianca Smith’s first thought when she got the call from the Boston Red Sox offering her a position with the organization’s minor league coaching staff.
Weeks later, the full historic significance of that phone call was still sinking in.
“I’ll be honest, it’s still kind of surreal,” Smith told Sportsnet during an interview last month.
The call that changed the course of Smith’s career and her life also wrote her name into baseball’s history books. With the hiring, the 29-year-old became the first Black woman to coach professional baseball.
What followed was a whirlwind of being thrust into the spotlight — something she didn’t necessarily expect, but is happy to embrace if it means more women and minorities can see themselves in the game, too.
“I wasn’t really expecting how big this would be for people. It is nice to see how many people are inspired by this, so I feel like I’m happy to take that,” Smith said. “I’m happy to be that person that helps inspire other women who might want to get into coaching. As long as I’m doing my job, helping develop our players on and off the field, helping them get to where they want to be, I’m happy with whatever happens outside of that, too.”
After spending the past year and a half in Waukesha, Wisc., working for the Div. III Carroll University Pioneers as a hitting coach and assistant athletic director for compliance and administration, Smith is heading south to Fort Myers, Fla. Once there, she’ll begin work with Boston’s minor-league affiliate and join the Red Sox for spring training when it opens later this month.
That journey south will mark the beginning of another chapter of Smith’s career in the game she loves — one several years in the making, and nurtured and guided along the way by a team of mentors in and around the game.
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As she begins her first job in pro baseball, Smith sums up her coaching style with one word: open.
“It’s gotta work for the player. It’s got nothing to do with us coaches — it’s about the player,” she said.
Through her work in analytics and biomechanics, Smith understands that every player requires a slightly different approach and has equipped herself with knowledge in all areas of the game.
“The reason why I do so much research on the analytics side, the biomechanics, is because I don’t want to get to the point where a player comes and asks for help and I can’t help them somehow,” she said. “It’s gonna happen — there’s always something I don’t know. The more I learn, the more I realize [what] I don’t know. It’s a humbling and scary experience when you hit that point, but at the same time there’s so much out there to learn. So I do know if a player comes to me and I can’t help them immediately … I’ll find somebody who can or I’ll research as much as I can. So that’s why I say it’s more ‘open.’”
And that openness applies across the board and includes the players who don’t speak the language of cutting-edge training techniques.
“Yes, I love learning about the biomechanics side. Yes, I love learning about the analytics. But there are players who, they just don’t care about that — and that’s perfectly fine. I study the biomechanics and the analytics to help the players who want to use that. And at the same time, for the players who don’t, I have to approach them differently.”
Smith believes in player-led coaching in one-on-one sessions.
“I encourage our players to come to individual practices, whenever I’m working with them one-on-one, come with what you want to work on. I don’t have to be the one to always tell you ‘This is what we’re gonna do today.’ I want you to be your own coach. I want you to be able to make your own adjustments, and then I’m just kind of that sounding board,” she explained. “I try to rely heavily on just asking them questions, like ‘How do you feel?’ and ‘What do you think about this?’ I try to make it clear that if they come up with a drill or something that works for them that I didn’t come up with, that doesn’t mean we’re not gonna do it. As long as there’s a reason they think it works, we’re gonna try it.”
TJ Pfaffle, a senior at Carroll University and catcher for the Pioneers, experienced that approach first-hand.
“Me and her have worked a lot recently just on my swing,” said Pfaffle. “Just having someone who knows a good amount about swing mechanics and just having that drive to help me get better is something I really haven’t had from coaches.”
In a sport as detail-oriented as baseball, even the most finite of adjustments can yield immense improvements.
“What she’s really helped with was my stride and timing aspect for pitches. For a solid week or two she personally helped me with restructuring my leg kick, which in hand has helped with timing. So, we would work in the batting cage together on getting my timing right because my upper body mechanics were fine, but she wanted to fine-tune my lower half, which was an issue she saw when I would send her videos of my swing during my own time.”
It’s clear, however, that Smith’s coaching legacy at Carroll University extends far beyond the numbers.
“Just her overall passion, drive, and energy for baseball that she has is probably my favourite part about having her as my coach these past two years,” said Pfaffle, who also credits Smith with ultimately helping him return for a fifth season with the Pioneers baseball program after the COVID-19 pandemic cut his senior year short. “Like, we could talk all day about my swing, and it’s built more of a friendship than it has like a coach/player relationship. One second we’ll talk about my swing and approach and the next we’re talking about what order from McDonald’s should we go get. So, it’s just been a truly amazing experience having her.”
Before it became a career, baseball was simply a passion for Smith. While a love for the sport doesn’t exactly run deep in Smith’s family — “We’re more of a soccer-football-basketball family,” she notes — Smith was smitten with the American national pastime from the start.
“My mom actually introduced me to the game when I was three, and from there I just kind of took it to the extreme,” Smith said. “She used to say I would fall in love with something and then just take it to a whole other level and just become obsessed.”
When she wasn’t watching games, she was nurturing that obsession with regular viewings of movies like The Sandlot, Rookie of the Year and Angels in the Outfield — DVDs she still has in her collection today.
Yet, even after a childhood spent steeped in the game, it wasn’t until college that she realized she could turn her passion into something more.
The idea of a career in the sport was sparked while at Dartmouth, where she began working for the baseball team. She also suited up herself as an outfielder on the softball team and as the only woman on the school’s club squad. By the time she graduated with a sociology degree, she’d had a hand in nearly every part of the game — playing, analytics, video and even a quick trial doing play-by-play.
Not long after, Smith moved to Cleveland to pursue a Masters of Business Administration in sports management and a Doctorate of Jurisprudence with an emphasis in sport law at Case Western Reserve University. There, she immediately got involved with all things baseball, serving as Case Western Reserve’s director of baseball operations and working as an athletics compliance assistant, and getting the chance to gain valuable on-field experience working with players.
“[Case Western Reserve head baseball coach] Matt Englander is the one who really gave me my first shot. It started as director of baseball operations, helping out with the business side and everything else but on the field, but [also] giving me the opportunity to get on the field,” she said. “It wasn’t like a ‘Sure, I guess we can give it a try and see what happens.’ It was just, ‘Yeah! Jump in. If you think you can help out, do it.’”
And so she did. From throwing BP to running analytics, and traveling with the team to steering its social media, Smith fully immersed herself in the team’s daily operations.
“She was doing a lot of the thankless, gritty, organizational work,” said former Case Western Reserve outfielder Tony Damiano, whose four years with the Div. III club began at the same time Smith joined the program. “As far as our success as players, and our comfort as players, I think there’s a lot that she did that we didn’t even see or know — that, without her, probably wouldn’t have gotten done.”
Damiano recalls Smith during games, iPad in hand and ready to help players with instant, analytically driven analysis and support between innings.
“Probably the thing I got most from her was being able to see the analytics mid-game, because she’d always be tracking that and keep that,” he said. “So, you were able to look back and even if it was just situational … it was all logged, and she was the one that was keeping it.”
Photo: Case Western Reserve University Sports Information
It was also during her time at Case Western Reserve that she first got in touch with Tyrone Brooks, who had then just become senior director of MLB’s Diversity Pipeline Program. Brooks remembers first reading Smith’s resumé and reaching out.
“I just realized this is somebody with a lot of potential that I’ve got to do everything I can to try to help her get to wherever she wants to go,” he said.
Through his work with MLB, Brooks oversees a number of initiatives aimed at recruiting and nurturing diverse voices at all levels of the game. And many of them, including the Diversity Fellowship Program and Take The Field — aimed at getting women into coaching and scouting opportunities — are yielding results.
Rachel Balkovec became the first female hitting coach in MLB history when she was hired by the New York Yankees in November 2019. That same day, the Chicago Cubs named Rachel Folden their lead hitting lab tech and fourth coach of their Arizona Rookie League team in Mesa.
Just last year, Alyssa Nakken made history twice. Hired in January 2020 as an assistant coach with the San Francisco Giants, she became the first woman to hold a full-time coaching position on a major league staff. Seven months later, she became the first woman to coach on the field when, during an exhibition game vs. Oakland on July 20, she took on first base-coaching duties in the late innings.
Smith, meanwhile, was part of the first Take the Field class in 2018, and one of the program’s biggest success stories to date.
“[Bianca] continues to be a beacon for us, to really shed light on [the fact that] the opportunity does exist — it’s out there,” said Brooks.
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In talking to Smith, it’s clear that respect and appreciation is mutual.
“There are so many people who have had an impact on the way I coach and just getting me here…. [Brooks has] been helping me since graduate school, giving me advice on my resumé, interview preparation,” she said. “Any time there’s a job opportunity, he reaches out, like, ‘Are you interested in this?’”
With Brooks in her corner, Smith thrived with every opportunity that came her way: She interned with the Texas Rangers in 2017 and then with the office of the commissioner in 2018 — the same year she also landed her first assistant coaching job with the University of Dallas. In 2019, she gained more on-field experience as an intern with the Cincinnati Reds.
It was through all of those experiences that Smith, who’d envisioned a career as an MLB general manager, realized her heart was not in the front office but at the ballpark.
“We had a really good, heart-to-heart talk about it,” Brooks reflected. “I’m just glad that now she has truly found her voice.
“She has put in a ton of hard work to put herself in this position, and I know she’s gonna continue to do so each and every day. Every player that has the opportunity to work with her is gonna see someone who is truly committed to helping them get better each and every day.”
As Smith embarks on this next chapter with the Red Sox, she’s got an entire network of coaches and players behind her.
“She’s gonna really, truly, I think be someone who’s gonna have a great chance to grow,” Brooks said of Smith. “I’m just excited about her pathway and where she’s headed right now…. The time is right for her.”
