Rachel Balkovec: The Yankees' First Female Hitting Coach, Sabbaticals, and the Utility of Being a Generalist

The Ready State Podcast

Kelly Starrett & Juliet Starrett

Fitness, Health & Fitness

4.9 • 623 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rachel Balkovec is in her second year as a minor league hitting coach with the New York Yankees. She is the first woman (alongside Rachel Folden of the Chicago Cubs) to hold that title in the history of professional baseball. She is one of 4 women that are in uniform in 2021 in various roles with Major League clubs. Rachel joined the Yankees in 2019 after completing her second master’s degree in biomechanics in the Netherlands where she served as an apprentice hitting coach for the national softball and baseball programs. She completed her research for this degree in eye tracking at Driveline Baseball.

Previous to crossing over to being a hitting coach, she spent 7 seasons in professional baseball as a strength and conditioning coach in various roles with the Houston Astros and St. Louis Cardinals. In addition to her more recent groundbreaking role with the Yankees, she was also the first woman to be hired full time as a strength and conditioning coach in MLB.

Before entering professional baseball in 2012, she served in various apprentice roles for Louisiana State University, Los Tigres Del Licey Beisbol, The Chicago Whitesox, Arizona State University and EXOS. The Omaha native is a former NCAA Division I softball catcher and has special interest in organizational culture and behavioral psychology. She has an undergraduate degree in Exercise Science, and a master’s degree in Sport Administration from LSU.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kelly Starrett.
0:06.8	And I'm Juliette.
0:08.0	And you're listening to The Ready State Podcast.
0:11.6	You got it.
0:13.5	This episode of the Ready State podcast is brought to you by Elements.
0:19.7	That's LMNT.
0:58.2	I want to talk about three sort of hidden reasons why I love Element. Let's hear it. One, I've noticed that my daughter is now drinking some, and she notices a difference when she goes to practice. She throws an element in her water. She chugs it because it tastes great, and then she actually performs a little bit better practice, she reports. Isn't that amazing? No salt. Boom, salt. What's the second thing? Second is that I see a lot of friends spending a lot of time in the sauna, which is super cool. People are getting hot. Everyone's talking about it. And guess what they're doing? They're blowing out all of their water and potentially some of their electrolytes. Myself included, because when we first started doing a lot of long sauning, I would often get a headache.
1:04.8	And then now I drink an element in the sauna along with a ton of water and I no longer get a headache.
1:08.6	Third, we just rolled through a local holiday tradition here.
1:12.6	And one of the things I'm noticing is that when people go hard in the paint, oftentimes, and that means alcohol, oftentimes they feel terrible the next day.
1:17.6	And you know what happens when they drink element, they feel less terrible.
1:19.6	Now, I don't know what the sciences of that, but it turns out that when you get your kidneys going,
1:24.6	you start rehydrating, your brain is like, oh, salts,
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1:53.7	readystate.com slash free element. That's free LMNT to check it out. This episode of the
2:00.1	Ready State is brought to you by Virtual Mobility Coach.
2:03.3	This may sound crazy, but last year, I kind of tried to clone my husband. Awesome. Only kind of,
2:07.8	though. You see, Kelly gets dozens of requests every day for help. And even though he wants to give
2:12.8	everyone his personal attention, there just aren't enough hours in the day. So I typed in
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