Marauders Lombardo – Rookie Coach with Veteran Poise

Bradenton Marauders’ development coach, Steph Lombardo, has no issues with paying her dues as a professional baseball coach.

Everyone connected with the Marauders is learning. Each day the players arrive at LECOM Park, they know practice and performance during their Florida State League games is what will determine the next step of their career.

Front office personnel are also working on their understanding of how a ball club should operate, with hopes of moving up the ladder of the minors and into the majors.

Coaching staff are putting in their time on mentoring players, from highly touted prospects to undrafted free agents. Everyone in Bradenton is mentoring someone, with a common goal of furthering each’s careers.

During a recent six-game home series with the visiting Daytona Tortugas, Lombardo sat down among the box seats behind the visiting team’s dugout to discuss where her career in baseball has come from and where she hopes to be in the near future.

The entry on Lombardo’s resume that is most fascinating is where she landed to further her coaching style and who some of her pupils were.

Between her introductory season with the Pittsburgh Pirates organization as a minor league operations assistant in February 2022 and her hiring this past January as a minor league developmental coach for the Marauders, Lombardo packed her bags for South America.

From Milwaukee and a proud alumnus as a standout Division I softball student-athlete at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lombardo makes it known that she doesn’t like to sit still in one place for too long. So, anyone familiar with the very ambitious Lombardo knows her accepting an infield coaching assignment for Caimanes de Barranquilla in Columbia this past October for three months was a baseball adventure to good to pass up.

“It was the best experience,” Lombardo said of her teaching baseball in South America. “This was the first time I was working with players older than me. The environment was beautiful. I was the first female coach in the league (Columbian Professional Baseball Winter League). I experienced no backlash at all.”

Among the players with Caimanes de Barranquilla with whom Lombardo interacted were Tampa Bay Rays’ Harold Ramirez and Detroit Tigers’ Gio Urshela. But, accepting coaching assignments outside of the United States seems to be a pattern, once organized Pirates’ baseball goes into hibernation for the winter.

Prior to accepting her first assignment within the Pirates’ organization as a minor league operations assistant, Lombardo spent the previous three months coaching in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Lombardo is in her first season coaching first base for the Marauders; however, her duties go beyond her game-time responsibilities.

“Bench coach, working with the infielders, whatever Jim (Marauders’ skipper Jim Horner) needs help with, I’m there,” Lombardo, 26, says.

The many responsibilities coaches have in preparing the team for each game keep Lombardo busy and enthused about the career path she has chosen. Creating position cards for the players to hold in their pockets during the game, hoping to give them an advantage over each opposing batter, Lombardo is comfortable handling all assignments.

There is a future for Lombardo today that didn’t exist less than a decade ago. All the Marauders’ first female coach needs to look at for motivation is Alyssa Nakken. Promoted in 2020 as an assistant coach on the San Francisco Giants MLB staff, Nakken’s position offered hope for women who one day hope to put on a big-league uniform. For Lombardo, wearing a Bradenton jersey with a Pirates patch on one of its sleeves is an honor she doesn’t take lightly.

“The first time I put on the uniform last spring, that was a cool moment,” recalls Lombardo of her time assigned with the Pirates’ Florida Complex League club at Pirate City. “When I saw my name on the back of it, then sitting in the dugout, that will always stick with me.”

A self-proclaimed baseball junkie, Lombardo tells of swinging a bat before she could walk. Her dad, Robert Lombardo, also a huge baseball fan, introduced the board game Strat-O-Matic to his daughter at an early age.

Whether bringing an infield in during a game or offering advice on running the bases, Lombardo is learning so much more about the pro game with every single day of Marauders practice and games. Her confidence is growing.

At six feet two inches tall, Lombardo is easy to locate on the playing field. She speaks with the confidence of a coach with far more years of experience than on her resume. Proud of her three years associated with the Badgers’ program, there apparently is no limit to Lombardo’s thirst (or geographical location) for baseball knowledge.

For now, bus trips to Fort Myers, Lakeland, Tampa, and a half-dozen other stadiums in the FSL are where Lombardo and her Marauders’ brethren are bettering their baseball skills. Their growth is limitless, which is what makes following Lombardo’s career so exciting. She believes anything is truly possible to achieve within the Pirates’ organization.