Today, Rachel Balkovec became the first woman to manage a minor league affiliate of an MLB team 👏 MerrillLiz has the full story:
"I hear from so many people, 'Oh, you're new to the game' and this and that. No, I've been here. I'm not this intense because I showed up to pro ball and I wanted to beat my chest. This is just who I am, and if anyone was destined to do this, it was me."
Jim Balkovec didn't put his middle child on his knee and tell her she could be anything. He awoke at 3 a.m. every morning to be at the airport by 5 a.m. for his customer service job at American Airlines, and won attendance awards. He taught his daughters that if they wanted something, they'd have to earn it.
"My parents aimed to make it purposely hard on us," Stephanie Balkovec says."They did not hand anything to us." Crossing your arms, Balkovec constantly told her, conveys a lack of confidence."Nobody's going to take you seriously."Pope is a clinical specialist now. Looking back, she says being friends with Balkovec was sort of like having her own personal coach. She'd never met someone like her.
Catcher seemed to be the perfect position for Balkovec, her high school coach Keith Engelkamp says. It allowed her to be in control and touch the ball often. One day in practice, the team ran a drill in which Balkovec was supposed to fire to second, but the pitcher forgot to move, and Balkovec's throw nailed her in the back of the head. She was knocked unconscious.Balkovec says she benefited from the"perfect storm" of strong-personality coaches and teams.
Hartigan went to West Texas A&M, and Balkovec, future journeywoman, committed to Creighton University, roughly 20 minutes from her house. Her freshman year, she developed the yips, a sudden inability to accurately throw the ball. Softball -- coaching or training -- seemed to be Balkovec's path to stability. But her interests had shifted to another sport. She'd dated a baseball player at New Mexico who was eventually drafted, and she was fascinated by the extensive player development of minor leaguers."There are a lot of barriers to high-level coaching for women right now [and] 10 years ago for sure when I got in," she says.
"There were points where -- god, you are on the struggle bus and you are so smart -- Why do you feel like you have to be in baseball?" Pope says."She just had it set in her mind, and she didn't need a whole lot of extra outside motivation. She had moments of doubt; she's human. But I could also watch her quickly turn it around."
But after nearly a decade in strength and conditioning, Balkovec wanted to reinvent herself. She maxed out her credit cards and sold most of her possessions to pursue a second degree in Amsterdam. She wanted to be a hitting coach. "We went from athletes throwing 5 to 7 mph lower to athletes [hitting personal records] in the lab," says Anthony Brady, Driveline's sports science manager."Rachel was super adamant about setting the tone for the culture in the lab and getting everything out of the athletes."
Balkovec traveled to North Carolina to get a glimpse of their dynasty in a venture she calls"culture camp." She also visited the perennial powerhouse Vanderbilt baseball team. In nearly every one of her jobs, someone has inevitably told Balkovec to dial down her intensity. Would they tell a man that? Maybe, she says, but it would be followed by the word,"badass."