There aren’t many women who line the walls of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Even fewer — about 11 in 2022 — have ever worn an MLB baseball jersey as an on-field coach, according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. One of those women is Katie Krall. She is also my twin sister. How is that for getting lucky in the sibling department?
Katie began golfing a decade before she would eventually change history with her baseball career. We both golfed competitively at the age of six in a weekly summer program at a local course in Northwest Wisconsin. Katie thrived in situations when something was on the line. She reveled in the complexity of competition. Not to take away from her achievements in the classroom, which were already many by the time she hit fifth grade. A result of being part of our public school’s gifted math and reading programs in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.
Elementary school golf lessons and competitions transitioned into high school summer tournaments in Wisconsin with the Wisconsin PGA and Northwest Junior Golf program for Katie. Admittedly, she would go head-to-head with me more often than not. However, any medals or trophies Katie or I won during these tournaments in the 14-18 year old division, are now combined and sit proudly in our family den. There is no distinction between which golden achievements are hers and which are mine. A metaphor for how my accomplishments are in large part thanks to Katie and vice-versa.
Katie (L) and Annie Krall (R) thrust their fists in the air during a 2013 Maine South High School pep rally during their junior year. The girls’ golf team was chasing continued success after qualifying for the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) state tournament for the first time in school history as a team in 2012.
When I asked my twin sister about how our sibling dynamic has helped her personally and professionally, she said, “I think very few people in this world can point to who I was when I was seven and who I am now at 26.”
“Having someone who could always ground me I find to be very valuable because things will change quite quickly,” Katie emphasized. “I’ve been given a platform that I maybe didn’t anticipate as young as I am. So remembering where I come from is paramount.”
Katie eventually took her athletic and academic talents to Maine South High School in Park Ridge, IL (a northwest suburb of Chicago) where she would become varsity co-captain her junior and senior year of the women’s golf team with me. If two visits to the Illinois state tournament weren’t enough, Katie also led her team as one of the four scores counted in matchplay nearly every competitive round throughout her high school career. Katie and I were very fortunate to field golf scholarship offers from D1 and D3 institutions like Georgetown University, Washington University in St. Louis, Yale University, and many others.
However, as potential third-generation Northwestern University Wildcats, with both of our parents and our grandmother, Millie Etten, getting degrees from the school, Katie and I decided to attend Northwestern solely as students — rather than as student-athletes.
Twin sisters, Katie (L) and Annie Krall (R) went to Northwestern University together, attending many Northwestern football games prior to their undergraduate graduation for Katie in 2018 and Annie in 2019.
It was at Northwestern that Katie’s baseball successes began to skyrocket. To her delight, and that of most of the Chicagoland area, the Chicago Cubs broke a 108-year-long World Series drought in 2016, during Katie’s sophomore year at Northwestern. It was Katie who between her history classes became the communications analyst at Culloton + Bauer Luce, the Chicago Cubs public affairs firm, tasked with planning the 2016 Cubs World Series trophy tour. She dictated where the trophy would be hosted in places all over Illinois and the world as Cubs fans made their almost deified pilgrimage to see the long-awaited silver cup; which in reality was not much bigger than a medium-sized duffle bag.
Katie has always moved fast. Whether it was ringing doorbells in rapid succession on Halloween to get as much candy as humanly possible or graduating from Northwestern with her bachelor’s degree in history in only three years, Katie does not like to waste time. There may be many reasons for this but in large part it’s because she doesn’t have time to waste.
“I’ve always been ambitious,” Katie highlighted. “I possess a restlessness to do more. So whether that’s graduating from Northwestern in three years, completing my MBA from the University of Chicago in less than two, I think there is this need to climb the next mountain.”
She hadn’t even walked across the stage of her Northwestern commencement ceremony in June 2018 before Katie had already set up shop in New York City at Major League Baseball (MLB) as the first female diversity and inclusion fellow at the sport’s headquarters. Working on the MLB league economics and operations team as a coordinator Katie shared, “it was really powerful to be at the central hub of baseball and to be part of something that combined my two loves of baseball and promoting gender equality.”
Being one of just thirty MLB diversity and inclusion fellows selected across the country from 1,800 applicants (less than a 2% acceptance rate), Katie said looking back, it was an honor.
“If I could say anything to my 21-year-old self it would be to trust yourself,” Katie shared. “I think the hours that I had were 12- or 14-hour days. I remember packing three separate meals in my backpack in order to get everything done at the New York office. Really trusting in the plan that God had for me and knowing that I had the skill set. It was just a question of being given the opportunity and building out the experiences I needed to really develop.”
Yet, even the biggest city in the U.S. couldn’t contain Katie for long. She missed that competitive edge first cultivated on a golf course when solely looking at high level organizational change.
Katie missed fighting for something.
Her self-proclaimed ambition and restlessness struck again, this time drawing her toward working full-time with an MLB team. Her horse in the race ended up being the Cincinnati Reds under general manager Nick Krall (no relation but yes coincidence). Katie joined the Cincinnati Reds as a baseball operations analyst in 2020, helping them to make the playoffs that year.
Her winning streak was back.
The Reds made it to the Wild Card series in 2020 as Katie, the team’s baseball operations analyst, helped with roster construction, trade decisions, and draft selections. A role not too unlike Jonah Hill’s in the 2011 film Moneyball who plays the Oakland Athletic’s fictional assistant general manager, bringing his Yale economics degree to the diamond to crunch data points with Billy Beane.
However, Katie’s quick mind and eye for raw talent wasn’t solely noticed by baseball leaders. When Google came knocking on Katie’s door, or more accurately rolling into her inbox, she realized the opportunity to work for one of the largest and most prestigious organizations in the world might be too good to pass up. Making the choice to diversify her experiences with a premiere big tech company, Katie’s competitive edge and mental toughness honed on golf courses in Illinois and Wisconsin led her to join Google’s team as a Go to Market Strategy Program Manager.
She stepped away from her passion for baseball to work for Google for all of three months before the Boston Red Sox would make a phone call that would change not only her life, but the game of baseball forever. They offered her a role in uniform to be a development coach with the Red Sox Double-A affiliate, the Portland Sea Dogs in Maine. At the time, neither the coaches nor Katie realized such a hire would be historic. Leaving Google and opting to take her strategy skills back to the baseball field, this time in uniform, made Katie the first woman to ever be a coach at the Double-A level.
I’ll admit, I’m biased in sharing the heroic level of pride I have for my twin sister and recounting the glass-ceiling shattering accomplishments Katie has achieved. Keep in mind, all of these roles and recognition have come to fruition in the first quarter of her life. However, I feel privileged as a journalist to get such a rare and personal front row seat to history.
Rather than getting a comment during a media briefing from Katie via a Zoom interview, phone call, or pre-game conversation with her like my fellow news and sports reporter colleagues at institutions like NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, or The Athletic have done, I get to talk to her everyday about her life and her work as many sisters do. I get to sit one bedroom over when we visit our parents in Chicago as she mentors young women and men over the phone who have dreams of working in baseball. For everything Katie has on her plate, she is never too busy to talk to someone who has reached out to her on LinkedIn or read about her story. She will always make the time.
When I ask the very typical big sister question (yes, I am six minutes older even if we are twins), “So, how was your day?” I get to hear about the middle school girls who run up to Katie asking for her autograph after games in Portland, Maine (Red Sox affiliate the Sea Dogs) because they’ve never seen a woman in a baseball uniform before. I don’t take my proximity to Katie for granted as a reporter but more importantly as a person.
I’m not the only one who has noticed Katie’s kindness in conjunction with her baseball knowledge as she was awarded the Charlie Eshbach Citizen of the Year Award by the Portland Sea Dogs in 2022.
Successful young women are asked constantly in job interviews, “who is someone you look up to?” If you’re a betting person, you’d likely put your money on the answer being: “my mother.” Katie and I are both very lucky that our mom, Joan Etten-Krall, is one of the most impressive business women you can have in the room. Being president of a major trade association in Chicago while simultaneously raising twin daughters along with our father, Darryl Krall, was no small feat. While I admittedly fall into the enthusiastic camp of saying my mother is a role model, I also have the unique luck of naming my former “womb-mate”, and college roommate at Northwestern University, Katie as a role model as well.
To think, the woman who will live forever in the Baseball Hall of Fame archives with her helmet being added to its historic walls thanks to her breaking the gender barrier for Double-A coaches, actually found so much of her love of a team culture on the green of a golf course rather than a baseball field is nothing short of inspiring. Especially as Katie takes on her next challenge in the sports science and biomechanics world with Hawk-Eye Innovations as their senior product manager for baseball strategy. A role where she will continue to look at technological advances and expectations for America’s pastime over the next decade.
“I’ve noticed there is a generation of women who have seen Alyssa Nakken with the Giants, who have seen Bianca Smith with the Red Sox, that being a female coach isn’t necessarily inconceivable anymore so I hope that they build on what we’re currently doing right now,” Katie highlighted. “We’re getting to a place where I guess this is normal. It’s not, ‘you’re a female baseball coach’ or ‘you’re a female hockey coach.’ You’re a coach. In the same way that you’re not a ‘female lawyer’ or a ‘female doctor.’ You’re a doctor and you’re a lawyer.”
Katie candidly shared, “As anti-climactic as that might be to say that we’re hoping for the normalization of something, it will be so profound and meaningful when the day comes that my story isn’t necessarily an anomaly. It’s just the story of someone who is pursuing their dream.”
A normalization of bringing more women into baseball is something Katie hopes to encourage as well on the golf course. Fighting the stigma that only older, white men are the ones who really play golf. A possible solution to making more women, and especially young women like Katie, feel included is, “dismantling the notion that you have to come to golf at an early age and that if you don’t, you’re behind.”
“If you’re a natural athlete, you’re going to pick it up far faster than anyone,” she emphasized. “Also, it can be a social game. You can play nine holes. You can go to the driving range with friends and then grab dinner. The amazing thing that I saw during the pandemic, one of the silver linings, is the communal aspect of golf really coming through. Women are absolutely a group of people that would be receptive and who should capitalize on this because it shouldn’t necessarily be limited to one race, one socioeconomic bracket, or one age group.”
Being a baseball anomaly for most of her career, Katie encourages other women in sports and dutifully accepts the challenge herself of being a role model on and off the baseball diamond. Not to mention on the golf course.
“Knowing that what you say, what you do, who you speak to, it matters,” Katie said. “It can have seismic effects on the women who come after me. I know I owe an obligation and a debt to the women who came before but being very cognizant of my place in history is something I always have top of mind.”
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