Athlete Life Management Group (ALMG) serves teams, agents and players with concierge services that help an international player relocate and adjust quickly to life as a professional athlete in the United States. Luchy Guerra leads ALMG’s specialists and experts who smooth the transition by completing passport and visa paperwork, arranging international travel, and setting up living space and personal finances. Luchy brings cross-cultural communication and her personal touch to all ALMG clients.
When Luchy Guerra bid farewell to the Los Angeles Dodgers organization in 2008, she was Assistant Director of International Player Development. Less than a handful of women had previously reached such a high position in Major League baseball.
Luchy attributes her success to her passion for the work. “To reach this level you have to work a lot and have good knowledge of the ballplayers. You are just a step away from being the (general) manager,” she says.
Yet Luchy herself is very down-to-earth about what she does. “I am the Paperwork Queen,” she says, “and I’m the Mom. The way I look at the players is as if they were my own children. I see it as my calling to do whatever I can do to make their lives easier so that they can play better on the field. That’s the satisfaction I get.”
Luchy cares deeply about the players and knows what they go through because she too made the transition to life in the United States. Born Luchy Binet in the Dominican Republic, she left her hometown of Santo Domingo to live with an aunt and uncle and attend the University of Maryland. Even then she showed creativity in solving the kinds of problems that foreign nationals face when transitioning to the United States.
“The spring before I started school I took English as a Second Language class each morning and went to a Smithsonian museum every afternoon, learning everything I could about English,” she said.
She met Jim Guerra at college and they moved to Los Angeles after marrying in 1989. Even though she was born near the “shortstop capital of Latin America,” baseball did not play a big role in her early life. But after meeting a Dodger employee through her church in Los Angeles, she put together a résumé, invented a job title, “Dominican-American Resource Liaison” and sent it to the Dodger’s front office.
“I wanted to help the players assimilate into American culture,” she said. “I knew of Latino players who were not really being taken care of.”
It took more than two years of persistence, but she was hired in December of 1992. She gradually built up her responsibilities as she helped players settle in at the club’s various minor-league cities. From greeting newly signed rookies and helping them with their homesickness, to ensuring that signing bonuses for uneducated recruits weren’t cashed by unscrupulous pseudo-agents, Luchy solved the myriad difficulties her international players encountered. As long as the players were content and their lives were going well off the field, Luchy felt she’d done her job.
In 2008, Luchy left the Dodgers organization to devote more attention to ALMG, where she now offers the same great support and personal attention to international athletes across Major League Baseball and the broader field of professional sports.