For the first time in a while, Bianca Smith will have one job this upcoming MLB season.
Over her past 11 or so years breaking into the sport, the Sewickley-born 29-year-old has done videography, helped out in press boxes, worked in front offices and been an assistant athletic director, among other things.
In many cases, those were the tasks Smith was explicitly hired to do, only finding her way to the baseball field after cold-emailing a coach at the three colleges she’s worked for or slowly expanding her role to include on-field baseball work.
“Several of my positions were positions that didn’t exist until I got there,” Smith said. “And not only did I help create them, but I expanded them based on what I believed I brought value and how I could actually help.”
Now, she’s been hired by the Boston Red Sox to work at their player development complex in Fort Myers, Fla., with a focus on position players. It makes her the first Black woman to hold an on-field coaching position in the history of professional baseball.
But despite her undeniable status as a ‘first,’ it’s not like Smith is surprised she’s made it here, even if she wasn’t always certain this was the path she wanted to take.
Those who have worked with her in the past aren’t surprised, either. They know firsthand the work she’s put in and how she can quickly help a program, and the players within it, for the better.
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Smith was born in Sewickley, but most of her upbringing took place in Grapevine, Texas. She moved there when she was just 6 or 7 years old, but her stepfather’s family remained in Sewickley and he lives there today, so her Pittsburgh roots are still planted.
She’s worked in a sporting goods store in the area and even interned for the defunct arena football league team, the Pittsburgh Power, at one time.
Plus, Smith says, she had an affinity for the Pirates because of those roots, though the spread-out nature of her family makes it hard for there to be a “favorite team.”
It wasn’t until arriving at Dartmouth, where she attended college, that Smith began to chase down her baseball dreams. She reached out to baseball coach Bob Whelan and asked if she could stop by the office to chat with him, and she did.
Smith did other things on campus. She was on the cheer team, for instance, and she started a sports business club. Really, though, she just wanted to be involved with the sport she loved most.
“She was always very clear about that,” Whelan says. “She was passionate not just about playing softball or that type of thing. She loved the sport of baseball and wanted to learn as much about all aspects of it.”
Whelan says Smith helped with everything around the program. She gave recruits tours of campus, she helped out with the scoreboard in the press box — whatever Whelan needed.
Heading into her junior year, Dartmouth’s softball team was low on numbers and held tryouts. Then-coach Rachel Hanson, by recommendation of Whelan, spoke with Smith, who tried out and made the team.
Her playing career itself was not necessarily prolific. Smith didn’t get much playing time, but as with Whelan, Hanson remembers that Smith was willing to do anything for the team. Smith said Thursday that she became a bullpen catcher for a time, too.
And along the way, the vision of Smith’s future goals had begun to crystallize.
“There are a lot of nerds, jock-nerds, at Dartmouth, and I love them for that, and she was one of them,” Hanson said. “She was just really into learning more about baseball, learning more about coaching. She would ask questions about what we were doing, why we were doing it.”
Added former assistant coach Linday Hanover: “She would study video like no other … and it wasn’t just her video. She was watching anybody we sent. It was a bunch. She wanted to know how and why. She’d listen into bullpens. She’d listen in the infield, she’d listen in the outfield, when she was a pinch-runner. She was always grabbing that knowledge.”
Graduating from Dartmouth in 2012, Smith took a year off before going to school again, this time at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where she pursued a dual J.D./MBA degree in sports law and sports management.
There again, Smith found her way to the baseball diamond. She was hired by Case Western’s baseball team as the director of baseball operations and a graduate assistant coach. That was where Smith began, as she puts it, “sneakily getting my way in.”
She just began doing more and more until she couldn’t be denied an on-field role.
“Gradually started doing analysis, gradually started doing more stats, gradually started evaluating our outfielders, and before I realized it, our coach was like, ‘Well, here’s a uniform. You’re pretty much on the coaching staff,’ ” Smith said.
Smith parlayed that experience into a front office internship with the Texas Rangers in 2017, then an internship with MLB in 2018, before returning to the Rangers’ youth academy as an intern in the fall of 2018.
In 2019, she took on a baseball operations role with the Cincinnati Reds. But Smith’s dream wasn’t necessarily in the front office. She wanted to be down on the field, with the players.
She remembers emailing manager David Bell, asking to speak with him — a tried and true method for Smith — but his busy schedule didn’t allow for much free time. So she just went down to the field one day and began taking notes.
A coach noticed her and brought her onto the field, and off she went. She remembers meaningful interactions with Reds stars Scooter Gennett and Joey Votto, both ensuring she felt welcomed.
“Thankfully the right people had my back to let me not only get on the field, but stay on the field,” Smith said. “It wasn’t just, ‘OK, show up for a day, see what it’s like and shadow.’ It was, ‘No, we want to get you here, see what you know, and then keep you here for as long as we can.’ ”
After that, Smith moved onto Carroll University in Waukesha, Wis. She became their assistant athletic director for compliance and administration in August 2019.
Baseball coach Stein Rear says Smith, “fell into their lap.” In his view, she was coming for the compliance gig and ended up meeting with him and working her way onto the staff.
“Having the compliance and administration part, just having that experience, was helpful,” Smith said. “But it was really them agreeing to let me also coach baseball, because I’d been applying for coaching positions for a couple years and trying to find one that was paid or just the opportunity to be involved was difficult for a while.”
Smith began working with baserunners and outfielders but eventually became the team’s hitting coordinator. She works in biomechanics and all aspects of new-age baseball technology.
That was somewhat new to Rear, who says he’s more of an old-school, hands-on coach who had only begun to implement the technology.
“At the NCAA Division III level, we don’t have a ton of money,” Rear said. “My assistant coaches aren’t getting paid enough to make a living off of, so when they come here, you know it’s for a couple reasons: It’s because they love the game, they want to stay involved and typically they want to move up the ladder, and they want to take that next step and advance to that next level.”
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Smith says the folks at Carroll have been extremely supportive of her move to the Red Sox. A single woman, she says she likes to joke that she has 60 kids: her players. Her players have expressed that they’ll miss her dearly, but she hopes to come back and visit and help out the team when she can.
In the end, this is exactly where Smith’s former coaches believed she could end up.
“She had a certain determination about her,” Hanson said. “You’ll hear people say, ‘Oh, yeah. Maybe I’ll coach someday.’ That’s very different from somebody who had clearly decided, ‘No, this is what I am going to do.’ And I remember at the time being struck by how clear-eyed she was about it.”
Added Hanover: “Back in the day, she told us she was going to do this, and she has done everything she said she was going to do. I just said to myself, ‘She did it. Oh, my gosh. She did it.’ ”
Perhaps the only part of this that Smith couldn’t have imagined is the way she’s now being viewed. Becoming the first Black woman to coach professional baseball carries a certain gravity. Her sports hero growing up, she says, was Jackie Robinson. In her Zoom conference call Thursday, she was asked about being in a similar position to Robinson — as a trail blazer — but she brushed that direct comparison off.
For her, it’s more about being a role model for younger Black girls. Smith wants the game to grow. She wants it to be inclusive. She wants women to be able to love the game and have it love her back the way she’s begun to experience it.
“Now that I’m in this position, I’m hoping to be that person that they can see that looks like them, and give them the idea that, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ ” Smith said of her position as a role model. “Because sometimes, it’s not the idea that I can’t do it, it’s just you’ve never thought about it because you don’t see anybody who looks like you.
“... When I was younger, I never thought about working in sports. I thought of other careers, and that was because I hadn’t seen anybody who looked like me really working in sports, at least publicly. So it does make a difference and at least gives them the idea that this is something else you can do.”
This isn’t the end of Smith’s journey, either. She says she wants to be an MLB manager some day.
For now, though, Smith is happy to get to work and focus on baseball and baseball alone, like she wanted to do at every stop along the way.
She jokes that, knowing herself, she might end up trying to take on even more responsibilities than her given role with the Red Sox.
Until then, she has one job — one no other Black woman has had before.
