‘Don’t limit yourself’
Dartmouth grad breaking barriers as Black female on-field coach in Red Sox system
Newest Red Sox minor league coach Bianca Smith arrived at college freshman year planning to study veterinary medicine.
“I changed my mind after taking a biology class,” Smith said during a Zoom call Thursday. “I wanted to be a veterinarian for the longest time. Even worked for our local veterinarian as a high schooler. I took one biology class and went, ‘No, actually this might not be the path for me.’ So kept searching. Started working for our local YMCA and realized that I still had a love for sports even when I wasn’t playing. And I knew if I was going to work in sports, it was going to be baseball. Football was my backup. But I was going to do whatever I could to stay in baseball.”
Smith — who played softball at Dartmouth and club baseball — is the first Black woman to serve as a coach in the history of professional baseball. The Red Sox hired her last month. She will work at the JetBlue Park spring training complex with minor league position players.
She began contemplating a career in baseball after her freshman year of college. Her initial goal was to become a GM. She didn’t think too much about coaching back then.
“I think part of that is kind of representation,” Smith said. “I’ve never seen another Black woman coaching, especially in baseball. So it never really crossed my mind that there might be an opportunity. It was always people in the front office. So my initial goal was General Manager. And it was the same mindset. I wanted to have an impact with the roster on the field. That’s why I wanted to go into the baseball ops side rather than business ops. So I should have known coaching then, but it didn’t really click.
“Even when I went to grad school, I knew I loved being on field,” Smith added. “I loved helping with our players. I loved going to practice. We’d have 5 o’clock practice and I would have no problem. I lived a mile away from campus and didn’t have a car. And I’d walk down in the middle of January when it was really snowy at 4:30 in the morning and loved it.”
The Dartmouth graduate also earned her MBA in sports management at Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, Ohio. She has a law degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
Her ultimate goal now is to work her way up to major league manager.
“I have an uncle that once told me, ‘Don’t limit yourself,’” Smith said. “This is when I still wanted to be a GM. I told him and he said, “Well, why not president?’ ... I want to go as high as I can. I want to continue to challenge myself. And right now, yes, that is I want to be manager. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”
She said some people sort of expect her to work in a front office eventually because she has a law and business degree.
“I still have family members who say, ‘Great, this is your first step to being a GM.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I still just want to coach.’”
Smith grew up in Grapevine, Texas. She said her mother Dawn Patterson introduced her to baseball when she was 2 or 3.
“But I have to give credit to those movies that came out in the ‘90s. Rookie of the Year,’ ‘The Sandlot,’ ‘Angels in the Outfield.’ I saw those and that continued my love of the game. And then I kind of studied it on my own, learned the strategy where I could follow the strategy watching the game without having to actually play.”
She comes to the Red Sox from Carroll University in Wisconsin where she has served as an assistant coach and assistant athletic director. She was hired there after spending summer 2019 as a baseball operations intern with the Reds.
“The idea that I just get to coach, I still haven’t really wrapped my head around it,” she said. “Yes, I’ve been coaching for multiple years. But all of my coaching positions have always been with a secondary duty. Or I had to work a second job so I could coach. So this will be the first time where I just get to focus on coaching. I’m beyond thrilled about that.”