Rachel Balkovec, who’s already spent over a decade blazing a trail for women in baseball, has a new job with a new team.

According to ESPN, the Miami Marlins have hired Balkovec away from the New York Yankees to serve as their new farm director. (The club has yet to confirm.)

The Marlins haven’t had an official director of player development since parting ways with Geoff DeGroot in September 2022, but Balkovec, with her two master’s degrees – in kinesiology from LSU and human movement sciences with a focus on biomechanics from Vrije University in the Netherlands – and many years of experience in the minor leagues and with cutting-edge analytics, is a worthy choice. She began her professional baseball career in the St. Louis Cardinals and Houston Astros organizations. With the former, she was the first woman to work full-time in strength and conditioning for a Major League affiliate. With the latter, she became the first woman to hold the position of Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator, learning Spanish to make sure she could do the job as effectively as possible.

Balkovec, 36, achieved another historic first when she joined the Yankees organization in 2019, becoming the first woman to serve as a full-time hitting coach. Coincidentally, this week marks two years since the Yankees promoted her to manager of their Class-A affiliate Tampa Tarpons, making her the first woman full-time manager league history.

“Rachel has helped me a lot with training, lifting, hitting,” Manny Ramirez told the Sydney Morning Herald in December 2020. The two bonded while he was playing for the Sydney Blue Sox of the Australian Baseball League; she joined the club the previous summer when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the 2020 MiLB season. She chronicled her adventures with Ramirez on TikTok, including a viral clip of him attempting to engage in conversation with someone wearing a Red Sox cap, and going unrecognized.

“She’s smart, she’s a woman of integrity, she knows what she wants, and she’s persistent. Rachel has a big future,” Ramirez said.

He wasn’t wrong, but it’s been a steep climb for Balkovec, as is almost always the case for women in male-dominated industries. Despite her two master’s degrees and previous experience with the Cardinals, it was difficult to find open doors early on in her career. After she applied to coaching jobs with 15 baseball teams in the Phoenix, Ariz. area and received no responses, she decided to conduct an experiment.

“After her messages were not answered when she initially applied for strength and conditioning jobs in baseball, she changed her first name on her résumé and applications to “Rae” from “Rachel.” Then the phone started ringing. Most callers were taken aback to hear a woman’s voice on the phone, she said, and wouldn’t call back a second time. One team flat out told her it would never hire a woman,” wrote Lindsay Berra in a New York Times profile of Balkovec.

Balkovec joins a Marlins front office full of newcomers: Peter Bendix, who replaced Kim Ng earlier in the offseason, has also hired former Red Sox player Gabe Kapler and Vinesh Kanthan to serve as assistant general manager and director of baseball operations, respectively.

Speaking of the Red Sox, Balkovec gives a lot of credit to Dillon Lawson, the new organization’s new upper-level MiLB hitting coordinator who worked with her in the Astros and Yankees organizations. “Dillon was a mentor of mine with the Astros, and I consider him a visionary in the game,” she told the New York Times in 2019.