Toronto Blue Jays hire another woman to coach in the Minors

The Toronto blue jays hired Jaime Vieira as a minor league hitting coach, making the Georgetown, Ontario native the first woman to coach in the organization.

Vieira, a former Humber Hawks softball player and coach with a Master of Science degree from York University, worked as a baseball operations research and development intern last year, helping prepare for the draft, among other duties.

She first joined the club in 2019 as a Program Specialist with the Jays Care Foundation and was promoted to Program Specialist a year later after developing and running a series of events for coaches and players.

#BlueJays hire Jaime Vieira as a minor-league hitting coach via @shidavidi. She’s the first woman to coach in the Jays organization https://t.co/gXqdi83j27

– Ben Nicholson-Smith (@bnicholsonsmith) January 10, 2022

It was not immediately clear where she will end up as coach this season, as the club is still finalizing roles for its minor league staff. But Vieira is the most recent example of how successful women are opening doors to roles in sports that until very recently had been exclusively for men.

On Sunday, Lindsey Adler of The Athletic reported that Rachel Balkovec will manage the low-A affiliate of the New York Yankees in Tampa, a first in affiliate professional baseball. Balkovec originally joined the Yankees organization as a minor league hitting coach in 2019, having previously worked as a strength and conditioning coach in the St. Louis Cardinals and Houston Astros systems.

In 2020, the San Francisco Giants made Alyssa Nakken the first full-time coach in the majors when she was added as an assistant coach on Gabe Kapler’s staff, while later that year, Kim Ng became the first. woman general manager when the Miami Marlins handed her over. the reins of the club.

In late 2017, the Blue Jays hired Nikki Huffman as their lead athletic coach, becoming the second woman to hold the position in the top four sports leagues in North America.

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