January 07, 2021

By Amanda Scurlock

Sports Writer

 

The Boston Red Sox hired Bianca Smith as a minor league coach for their organization on Monday. Smith is now the first Black woman to coach professional baseball.

“The opportunity is amazing,” Smith said. “I’m still wrapping my head around it. I probably won’t really have it sink in until I’m actually there.”

Smith, a native of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, will be based at the Red Sox’s player development facility in Fort Myers, Florida, to work with position players. Her focus is to customize training drills to the individual bodies of players and to understand how bodies work.

In the past, she has worked with players based on their statistics and metrics.

Since 2018, she had been working for the Carroll University Pioneers baseball team, starting off as an assistant coach and hitting coordinator. In 2019, she was promoted to assistant athletic director for compliance and Administration.

Smith will begin her duties with the Red Sox after she finishes training the Pioneers.

“As the hitting coordinator, I run all of our technology side for hitting at Carroll,” Smith said. “The number of different resources that the Red Sox have as far as tech goes, I’m really excited to get my hands on that and learning the different metrics and being able to dive deeper into what I currently have is pretty exciting.”

Prior to working with Carroll University, Smith was an assistant coach at the University of Dallas. From 2013-2017, she worked with Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) as a director of baseball operations.

At CWRU, Smith transitioned the athletic department records and files onto an electronic database, created monthly compliance newsletters, conducted team compliance meetings, and made sure that every student athlete was NCAA compliant.

Other duties she managed were handling the social media and travel accommodations and the game day operations for the baseball program.

This will not be the first time Smith worked with a major league baseball team, as she has experience coaching and assisting with the Texas Rangers and the Cincinnati Reds. She once was an intern in the MLB corporate offices.

Smith has an M.B.A. in sports management from the Weatherhead School of Management and a J.D. from the CWRU School of Law. She also did a marketing and events internship for the Pittsburgh Power Arena Football team and was a social media director for Sewickley Sporting Goods.

Smith is a second-generation Dartmouth University undergraduate, earning a B.A. in sociology in 2012. During her time there, she was manager of the baseball team.

As a junior, Smith walked on to the softball team, competing in 17 games mainly as a pinch runner, scoring eight runs. She did not compete during her senior year due to injury.

Smith hopes to be a role model for the next generation.

“I think it’s a great opportunity also to kind of inspire other women who are interested in this game,” she said. “This is not really something I thought about it when I was younger. I kind of fell into it being an athlete. So I’m excited to get that chance to show what I can do.”

Category: Sports