Sande Charles29-year-old Bianca Smith made history last week when the Boston Red Sox hired her to be a minor league coach with their Rookie-level team making her the first African American female to ever coach in professional baseball. Smith played college softball at Dartmouth University. Her parents also attended Dartmouth, and the newest Red Sock admitted that she only had one school in mind for college, and that was Dartmouth. “Thankfully, I got in because it was the only school I applied to, ” Smith told Sports360.
Her love for baseball started at a young age, thanks to her mom and her love of baseball movies she watched growing up. She fell in love with the game and was even on club baseball teams. From Dartmouth, she went on to Case Western Reserve to get her MBA.
It wasn’t just about getting her masters, though; Smith wanted to go to a school where she could also be involved with the baseball team, and Case Western allowed just that. She jokes that she was having so much fun coaching the baseball team while she got her MBA that she decided to go two more years and get her Law Degree. She now has her JDMBA with Sports Law and Sports Management as the focuses. Not many coaches in MLB can say they have their law degree and a master’s.
The former Dartmouth grad currently works as an Assistant Athletic Director at Carroll University, where she is also a local little league coach. She has 190 young athletes all learning under her. She admits that landing a coaching job in baseball was hard, and that is why she had to go and get other jobs in the meantime until the right one opened.
That’s where the Red Sox enter… In fact, the position that Bianca landed wasn’t one she had applied to. The Red Sox found her, and after a week-long interview process, some interviews going two hours, the Sox offered her the job. “I had to control my excitement on the call,” Smith expressed.
Smith, making dreams come true with hard work and determination, paving the way for young athletes and other females in the game. Her schooling is impressive, but the most impressive thing is even during all of her schoolings and her accomplishments, she still went and interned for Major League teams. She interned with the Reds and the Rangers. Both of which offered different opportunities that still help her today.
The Reds, in her words, are the ones that allowed her to get up close to the coaches and to the players on the field. And now she’ll be on the field herself as a coach for the Red Sox.
From Dartmouth to the Big Leagues, Bianca Smith is an inspiration.
