Dartmouth grad joins Red Sox
- Updated: January 4, 2021
HANOVER — The Boston Red Sox have hired former Dartmouth softball player Bianca Smith to serve as a minor league coach in the 2021 season, making her the first black woman to serve as a professional coach at any level of a Major League Baseball organization in the league’s 151-year history.
Smith, a 2012 Dartmouth graduate, will work with the position players for the Gulf Coast League Red Sox, the team’s rookie-level affiliate in Fort Myers, Florida.
“She was a great candidate coming in,” Red Sox vice president of player development Ben Crockett told The Boston Globe. “She’s had some really interesting experiences and has been passionate about growing her skill set and development herself.”
Smith, hailing from Sewickley, Penn., followed in the footsteps of her parents when she enrolled at Dartmouth in the fall of 2008. She served as a manager for the baseball team for a time before walking onto the softball team in her junior season, appearing in 17 games — primarily as a pinch runner — and scoring eight runs. An injury kept her out of game action as a senior.
After graduating with a degree in sociology, Smith was a graduate assistant and director of baseball operations at Case Western Reserve, then was hired by the University of Dallas as an assistant coach. She also interned for in the baseball operations department with the Texas Rangers and the Cincinnati Reds, plus spent some time working for MLB in amateur administration.
Most recently, Smith was the assistant baseball coach and hitting coordinator at Carroll University in Wisconsin since 2019.
Smith isn’t the only female associated with Dartmouth making headlines in the male professional sports realm of late. During the 2020 NFL season, Callie Brownson — the former offensive quality control coach for the Big Green football team — became the first female to coach a position group for an NFL team (Cleveland Browns). And back in September, both Brownson and another former Dartmouth quality control coach, Jennifer King, participated in the first NFL regular-season game in which a female coach was on both sidelines as a female officiated the contest (Cleveland vs. Washington).
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