Rachel Folden

Rachel Folden

• School: Marshall University

Biographical Information

After more than a century of baseball, women are finally making it into professional baseball as coaches. In 2020, Rachel Folden joined Alyssa Nakken and Rachel Balkovec as new hires. They were preceded by Justine Siegal who coached in the independent leagues and worked with the Oakland Athletics. These women also are part of a broader trend in professional baseball to hire coaches from non-traditional backgrounds such as hitting/pitching academies and coaches who are immersed in analytics and/or biomechanics.

Folden is a 2008 graduate of Marshall University with a major in history and a minor in mathematics. She was named to the Marshall Athletics Hall of Fame in 2019. Folden is a former professional fast pitch softball player with the Chicago Bandits from 2008-2012 and Carolina Diamonds in 2012. Both teams played in the National Pro Fastpitch league.

Folden began her coaching career while still playing professionally. She was the head coach for the Encinal High School Jets in 2009 while also working as a graduate assistant coach with Holy Names University. Folden spent the 2010-2011 seasons as an assistant coach at Valparaiso University. In all three cases, the softball teams she coached showed significant improvements from prior years.

After Folden retired in 2012 from playing, she founded Folden Fastpitch in northwest Indiana which she still owns and operates as of 2020. In 2017 she also became a hitting consultant for Elite Baseball Training which was run by Justin Stone. When the Chicago Cubs hired Stone as their new director of hitting in 2019, he immediately looked to hire Folden to run the Cubs' Arizona hitting lab. The Cubs announced Folden's hiring on November 22, 2019, the same day the New York Yankees announced their hiring of Rachel Balkovec. In addition to being the leading hitting lab technician, Folden was scheduled to be one of two hitting coaches for the AZL Cubs Blue before COVID-19 forced the cancellation of the minor league season. Folden was a hitting coach for the ACL Cubs in 2021-2022. She spent 2023 as the Cubs' minor league hitting coordinator. Folden moved to the Double-A Tennessee Smokies as their hitting coach in 2024.

Related Sites

• Folden Fastpitch Bio
• Cubs Hire Folden: 'She's going to be a Star'