Luisa Gauci to be named Brewers MiLB hitting coach

MILWAUKEE -- Luisa Gauci will be named hitting coach for one of the Brewers’ Arizona Complex League affiliates when the club announces its 2024 organizational coaching roster later this month, joining a growing group of women making their mark in professional baseball.

Coaching the art of hitting is an art in itself, but the technology-savvy Gauci is taking on the challenge with a clear philosophy about how to do it right.

“I love being able to see people with no preconceptions,” Gauci said. “At the end of the day, I’m a woman in a male-dominated sport, right? I was a woman on the baseball field. If everybody [prejudged] me, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

“They’d look at me and say I’m undersized. They’d say I’m a woman and I shouldn’t be on the field. That I should be playing softball. If I had the same approach to how I coach hitters, that would be horrible, right? I would just see everybody at face value.

“So, I have the coaching style of coming out there to help everybody, no matter what round they were drafted, no matter the color of their skin, male or female. I’m driven to be the best coach I can because I’m never going to play in the big leagues, but I can help other people do that.”

For Gauci, it continues a rapid rise to prominence in an industry mostly populated by men -- along with other groundbreaking women in baseball like newly hired Marlins farm director Rachel Balkovec and former Brewers Minor League hitting coordinator Sara Goodrum.

Gauci credited her past four years working with Driveline Baseball, the training facility outside Seattle. She arrived in 2020 during her collegiate playing career and eventually worked there, departing with the title of “baseball technology manager and sports scientist.”

Along the way she also earned a degree in information technology from Green River Community College and picked up coaching experience last summer in the prospect-rich Cape Cod League, then at Phoenix College, where the head coach is Scott Schneider, the Brewers’ former rehab coach who now consults with the club. She also gained experience via MLB’s coaching development program, with a coaching stint with the Scottsdale Scorpions in the Arizona Fall League.

Without that trove of experience, the opportunity in pro baseball, “would have still been just a dream.”

“With all of this new technology, we can give you all of the tools to succeed,” Gauci said. “We’re not just bucketing people based off of what round they were drafted in.”

Her roots are in Brisbane, where Gauci developed an early interest in softball. But as she described in a video produced by Driveline, Gauci went to a baseball tryout after being cut from her school’s softball team. She was eager and athletic, and took to the sport immediately, leading her to pursue baseball after high school, first at West L.A. College in Los Angeles and then, after getting involved with Driveline, on a scholarship at nearby Green River College in Auburn, Wash.

During that period, she met Driveline’s lead hitting coordinator, Tanner Stokey, and discovered a love for using video and other technology to perfect a hitter’s swing.

“I annoyed him every single day with a bunch of video and I would stay on him because I really wanted to get better,” Gauci said in Driveline’s video.

Now, she will have the opportunity to help young professional ballplayers do the same.

“It’s not lost on me what it means to women in baseball, what it means to our industry in general, but the thing that shone through here is what Luisa has committed herself to over the last couple of years,” said Brewers vice president of player development Cam Castro. “It’s a really great thing for us to be part of as an organization, to help grow the game in general, and in all directions.”

Early in the Brewers’ process, Gauci stood out.

“I think we amassed a few hundred resumes to review and we sent out 20-plus written exercises during the first round of this process, and right from the beginning, Luisa exemplified what we were looking for in this role,” Castro said. “We’re betting on somebody we think can make us better right out of the gate.”

The Brewers are still finalizing a number of other coaching positions in the Minor League system and are expected to release their full 2024 player development staff in a couple of weeks.