By Leslie Linthicum

On Jan. 10, former New York Yankees All-Star pitcher CC Sabathia tweeted a photo of UNM alumna Rachel Balkovec fitted out in Yankees pinstripes with the message: “Keep breaking barriers, Rachel. Salute!”

It was a big day for Balkovec (’09 BS), a history-making day in a sports career that has seen its share of firsts.

At 28, Balkovec was the first woman to be named a conditioning coach for a Major League Baseball team when she took over as the Latin America strength and conditioning coordinator for the Houston Astros, based in the Dominican Republic.

At 32, she became the first woman hired as a full-time hitting coach in the majors when the Yankees signed her on as the team’s minor-league hitting coach.

Now 34, the former Lobo catcher is packing up the moving van again, this time headed for Tampa Bay, Fla., and another spot in history. She takes over as manager of the Tampa Tarpons, the Yankees’ Class A affiliate team, becoming the first woman to be called ‘skipper.’

“The first word that comes to mind is gratitude,” Balkovec said in her debut press conference with the Yankees — which was crowded with 112 media participants on Zoom.

Balkovec noted the Yankees’ long history of progressive hiring. (In March 1998, Kim Ng, another former college softball player, was the Yankees’ assistant general manager. Ng went on to be the first female general manager in baseball.) And she tipped her hat to her parents, “who raised me to be a competitive athlete, not a woman or a man, but just to be competitive and capable and aggressive.”

Asked about the sexist blowback to her hiring, Balkovec noted her resiliency.

“Three years ago, I was sleeping on a mattress that I had pulled out of a dumpster in Amsterdam. If you know yourself and you know where you came from, it doesn’t really matter.”

She calls her story “the American dream” and is adjusting to a new level of attention, including some shoutouts from some heroes.

“I can die now,” Balkovec joked. “Billie Jean King congratulated me.”

Balkovec came to UNM from Creighton University, recruited to play catcher for the Lobos. By the time she graduated in 2009, she had changed her major from psychology to exercise science and then to kinesiology, with an eye to a career helping athletes perfect their performances.

Among her mentors were former UNM instructor Chris Frankel and Len Kravitz, associate professor of exercise science at UNM, who taught her that coaching is motivating others to learn.

She had graduated from UNM and was working on her master’s degree in kinesiology at Louisiana State University in 2012, when the St. Louis Cardinals called looking for a student to work as a Minor League strength and conditioning coach at their baseball training camp near Baton Rouge. The Cardinals took a leap of faith and hired Balkovec, who was working as a graduate assistant strength and conditioning coach at the school.

When the internship ended and she had her degree, Balkovec had an enviable resume for a 26-year-old: A master’s degree in sports administration, experience working with athletes on strength and conditioning at two universities and experience with the Cardinals.

She moved to Arizona, one of the hubs of baseball spring training, applied for every job listed in Major League Baseball and waited hopefully.

“I got crickets,” Balkovec said.

The one baseball representative who showed interest in hiring her later called her to let her know that it was her gender, not her qualifications, that scuttled her chances. And he said he had called around to other teams and heard the same story. She appreciated his candor.

“I finally understood,” she said.

With the doors of Major League Baseball closed tight, Balkovec took a job waitressing in Phoenix, volunteered at Arizona State University and entered what she calls “the dark times.”

Some colleges approached Balkovec about openings in strength and conditioning, but always for women’s sports. Even though she had respect for women’s sports, it bothered her that those were the only doors open to her. She dug in.

One of her sisters suggested she apply for jobs as “Rae Balkovec.” She immediately got email responses, but the conversations ended when they reached her on the phone. Balkovec quickly dropped Rae and went back to Rachel.

Finally, the call came from the Chicago White Sox, who hired her as a strength and conditioning coach.

The White Sox job led to a job back with the Cardinals as the Minor League strength and conditioning coordinator. In November 2015, the Astros brought her on as the Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator.

Balkovec spent a lot of time in the Dominican Republic, taught herself Spanish and some salsa moves and got valuable experience in understanding the Major League Baseball system and learning how to interact with young male players.

In between those temporary stints, Balkovec moved to Amsterdam (the place she scored the free mattress) in 2019 to pursue a second master’s degree in biomechanics and work as the apprentice hitting coach for the Netherlands National baseball and softball team.

When she returned to the United States, she was back to the dark days. With two master’s degrees in human movement science and a list of MLB credits on her resume, she took an internship with a technology firm that uses eye tracking to aid hitters and started knocking on MLB’s door again.

When the Yankees hired her as the league’s first full-time female coach, she was 32 and had lived in 15 cities in 12 years.

“When I actually got that job, I had $14 in my bank account,” Balkovec said. “I was broke as a joke.”

She called her parents to tell them she had made history. And to ask them if they could lend her some money to cover her move.

Balkovec nods to her parents for setting the stage for her ground-breaking career.

“My father and mother, they deserve an award,” Balkovec said. “They literally raised three girls to be absolute hellions.”

The Balkovec girls didn’t grow up with gender barriers that told them that certain goals weren’t possible. So Balkovec naively thought she could get any job based on her skills and was brought up short when she learned otherwise.

“This is a little counterintuitive,” Balkovec said, “but I’m glad I was discriminated against. By the time I was full time, I had done multiple internships. I was super prepared. I’m glad my path was difficult and it still serves me to this day.”

Kevin Reese, Yankees vice president of player development, approached Balkovec about the manager job in mid-December.

Reese says there was no agonizing or even much discussion when Balkovec’s name came up as a possibility to fill the Tarpon’s manager slot.

“It’s a no-brainer,” he said. “The feedback was always positive on Rachel. Everybody was on board. This is about her qualifications and her ability to lead.”

What can the Tarpons players expect from their new manager?

“It’s going to be high standards and clear standards. It’s going back to honesty and being direct,” Balkovec said. “Getting every day to matter and every practice to matter, that’s what I’m really passionate about.”

And it should be fun.

“They can definitely expect some loud music in the clubhouse,” she says.

Since getting the skipper job, Balkovec has been working 14-hour days, immersing herself in all aspects of a baseball team. While her experience has been in strength and conditioning and hitting, Balkovec is getting up to speed on fielding and pitching as well as all the aspects of running an organization and team travel.

One aspect of the job has always come easily for Balkovec — developing camaraderie and cohesion among players.

“My goal is really to know the names of the girlfriends, the dogs, the families of all the players,” she said. “My goal is to develop them as young men and young people who have an immense amount of pressure on them. My goal is to support the coaches that are on the staff.”

In Class A, she will have the youngest and least experienced players to work with.

“We’re going to be talking more nuts and bolts of pitching and hitting with them, and defense,” Balkovec said. “It’s really just to be a supporter, and to facilitate an environment where they can be successful.”

Even though she’s a trailblazer, Balkovec has experienced very little sexism on the field or in the clubhouse.

“In 10 years, so little that it’s not even worth mentioning,” she said. Players have a certain level of curiosity when they’re meeting the first female coach they’ve ever known, which Balkovec understands as completely normal.

“I just know within five minutes — my presence in the room, I speak confidently, I’m bilingual — it all just goes away. The players I’ve worked with, I do feel — whether they like me or they don’t like me, they like what I’m saying or they don’t like what I’m saying — they respect me. They do know I’m passionate and hard-working and I know what I’m talking about.”

Balkovec notes that there are now 11 women in uniform in baseball today, so the tide is turning slowly.

“There were many times in my career where I felt extremely lonely and I literally didn’t have anyone to call who had been going through the same experiences,” she said.

Balkovec is active on social media, which she says isn’t about feeding her brand, but inspiring others.

“I want to be a visible idea for young women. I want to be a visible idea for dads that have daughters,” she said. “I want to be out there. It’s something I’m very passionate about.”

Brian Cashman, the Yankees general manager who recruited Ng more than 25 years ago and put the first crack in baseball’s glass ceiling, calls Balkovec “a really impactful, smart person. What’s she’s bringing to the table is her knowledge and her strength and her perseverance and her thoughtfulness and her empathy. She’s as tough as they come.”

Balkovec’s ultimate goal is to be a general manager.

“Right now, I’m a manager,” she said. “I don’t really have a timeline for when I would leave, but I just know in the future, that leadership and the front office is definitely present in my mind.”

I understand that’s a very long-term goal,” she said.

When asked whether she has the skills to go higher in coaching or management, Cashman said, “The sky’s the limit. She’s determined. She’s strong. She’s got perseverance. I would not put any limitations on what her future would entail. She’s willing to go to the ends of the earth to accomplish her goals. This is someone who will not be denied.”

By Leslie Linthicum

When Jimmy Santiago Baca stands in front of a classroom — maybe it’s a high school in East L.A., or a jail in New Mexico or a seminar at Berkeley or Yale — he’ll challenge aspiring writers to tap into their trauma and find their truth. And he’ll tell them they already have the tools they need: “You have imagination and you have experience,” he’ll say. “That’s where writing comes from.”

And he will likely share his own truth: that books saved his life.

Baca (’84 BA, ’03 HOND), one of the nation’s most prolific and decorated writers, has had 31 books published in 26 languages, and at 70 he still adheres to his morning practice of settling in at the keyboard at 5:30 a.m.

Known primarily as a poet, he also has written novels, short stories and screenplays and is at work on a trilogy while teaching and touring the country reading and lecturing.

It is a charmed life, complete with financial security and a warm family. No one is as surprised and delighted by that as Baca, the former orphan, drinker, drugger and badass criminal.

“A lot of times, no matter how bad things are, I always see myself as being very fortunate,” he says. “There’s not a morning that goes by that I don’t tell the Lord thank you, thank you, thank you.” 

His biography has the outlines of a movie and indeed it has been told in a memoir, “A Place to Stand,” published in 2007, and a documentary film in 2014. Born in Santa Fe to a father who drank and was largely absent and a mother who abandoned him and his brother and sister when they were small, he was taken in by his grandparents, then delivered to a Catholic orphanage at age 7, where he lived until he ran away at 13 and was placed in youth detention. At 15, he ran away from there and lived a hand-to-mouth existence, drinking, fighting, getting high, crashing in abandoned homes. Arrested at 17 for a crime he didn’t commit, he spent some time in the county jail before being released. He headed West and was running a lucrative marijuana distribution business in Yuma, Ariz., when he was visiting a heroin dealer’s home as it was raided by federal agents. An agent was shot and Baca was sentenced to five years behind bars for drug possession.

‘I can’t describe how words electrified me.’

He was 20 when he walked into a maximum-security prison in Florence, Ariz., the place where he would teach himself to read and write alone in a cell and begin corresponding with a Good Samaritan who sent him books and paper.

He describes his awakening in “A Place to Stand.”

“I would set my dictionary next to me, prop my paper on my knees, sharpen my pencil with my teeth, and begin my reply. I would try to write the thoughts going through my mind, but they didn’t come out right. They lacked reality. A stream of ideas flowed through me, but they lost their strength as soon as I put them down. I erased so often and so hard I made holes in the paper. After hours of plodding word by word to write a clear sentence, I would read it and it didn’t even come close to what I’d meant to say. After a day of looking up words and writing, I’d be exhausted, as if I had run ten miles. I can’t describe how words electrified me. I could smell and taste and see their images vividly. I found myself waking up at 4 a.m. to reread a word or copy a definition.”

As Baca’s thirst for words grew, he began borrowing books from other inmates.

“Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, all the great ones,” he says on a warm morning on the patio of his home in Albuquerque. “Death Row was on the other side of where they kept us, and I was a porter, so I used to be able to go over there and they’d give me their books. They always read the coolest books. Hemingway, Faulkner and a lot of Russian writers. ‘War and Peace’ — come on, that was like my religion.”

Language opened up something in him and what could have been a soul-crushing experience — fights, stabbings, years spent in dark solitary confinement cells because he refused to work — became a rebirth. He fell in love with collections of poems by Shelley, Byron, Neruda and Lorca.  He began to review his life through a different lens.

“It was me deciding what I wanted to do with my life,” Baca says. “Me deciding that I probably wouldn’t have made a great criminal but I was really attracted to reading, so I read.”

Sitting alone in the dark for days on end, trying not to go crazy, helped hone writerly skills.

“It was absolutely an opportunity,” Baca says. “You practice your imagination. You practice disembodiment. You practice your memory.”

Baca had plenty of opportunity to practice writing and to dig into the insights and emotions that are the backbone of the poem.

“It was really fortunate to live in a place where death and life met each other every day,” Baca says, “rather than live this passive life where the biggest obstacle is paying the bills and the IRS.”

In exchange for cigarettes or coffee, he wrote poems for other inmates to commemorate events in their lives and to give to their mothers or children or girlfriends. Often, he had to read them aloud to inmates because they couldn’t read.

‘How can you kill and still be a poet?’

When another inmate disrespected Baca and a prison elder advised him he had to fight or be seen as vulnerable as he served out the rest of his time, he came to the realization that his life was changed.

As he recounts in his memoir, he was in the clutch of the fight with the other inmate lying on his back.

“He was partially unconscious, stunned, bleeding from a cracked cheekbone. He took out a shank he’d hidden beneath his sock and I grabbed it. I was standing over him, my feet planted on each side of his shoulders. In that moment, all I could see was his face, the blood pouring out from a wound in his cheek where a bone was exposed. In that moment, everything seemed so calm and quiet. I gripped the shank to stab him. For a second, every horrible thing that had happened to me in my life exploded to the surface as if had been building up to this moment. The blade in my hand, my legs spread over his chest, I loomed over him, staring into his eyes and then at his heart. While the desire to murder him was strong, so were the voices of Neruda and Lorca that passed through my mind, praising life as sacred and challenging me: How can you kill and still be a poet? How can you ever write another poem if you disrespect life in this manner? Do you know you will be forever changed by this act? It will haunt you to your dying breath.”

He chose to become a poet. By the time he was released with $20 and the clothes he entered prison in, Baca had sold some poems to Mother Jones magazine and had contacts with other writers and editors. He went to North Carolina and got his GED and took some community college classes.

Then he returned to New Mexico and had his first collection of poems, “Immigrants in Our Own Land,” published in 1979 and began to make a life as a writer. By the early 1980s, Baca had married, had a baby and bought a fixer-upper. How to pay a mortgage as a poet? Baca enrolled in UNM.

“I needed some money to pay the mortgage and they were offering these Pell grants,” Baca explains. “I had no interest in going to school, but when I got there, I loved it.”

He studied literature, of course, and a new way of looking at books opened up for him.

“I loved the environment of being around so many books. And I really loved the professors,” Baca says. “They had so much to offer. It was like talking to convicts on the yard about writing, but these guys knew all about literature.”

He graduated in 1984 and broke out several years later with the publication of “Martin & Meditations in the South Valley” in 1987, which won the American Book Award and the Pushcart Prize. He won the Taos Poetry Circus — the mother of slam poetry contests — in 1992 and 1993. In 1995 he was invited by PBS journalist Bill Moyers to be part of a televised series on poetry.

Ben Daitz, M.D., a family medicine physician at UNM and a writer himself, met Baca in the poetry slam days and they have remained friends for 40 years.

“His history is pretty dramatic and I think it took him awhile to settle down,” says Daitz, now professor emeritus at the UNM School of Medicine and a documentary filmmaker. “But he did. I think he’s mellowed. He’s more comfortable in his own skin. Part of that is getting older and growing out of his rebellion. And he’s got a great family that is very important to him.”

Baca divorced, married a second time and has four children, one still at home. He has held endowed chairs at Colorado College, Yale and University of California, Berkeley, among other colleges and universities. While he has traveled the world reading, speaking and teaching, he spends more time now in New Mexico, riding his bike, running in the bosque, volunteering as a writing teacher in schools and putting on an annual writer’s retreat. Teaching, as much as writing, has been a foundation of Baca’s life.

“It’s just the service that I think I’m obligated to undertake,” he says. “I was given a great gift. I don’t just want to get rich and famous. I want to spread it around.”