Amy Dames Smith coached Linfield's women's tennis team to 108 consecutive Northwest Conference wins. (Linfield College)

Amy Dames Smith acknowledges that she has “big shoes to fill” as the new athletic director at St. Mary's Academy, where she is replacing the legendary Anna Maria Lopez.

So as she settles into the role this summer, Dames Smith is looking to strike the proper balance in finding her own way.

“I can't be Anna Maria 2.0, because there's only one,” Dames Smith said. “There's just such a history here from her time and what she's built, as well as the values of the school itself that are going to be like a north star. At the same time, I'm excited to put my own spin on things.”

The downtown Portland all-girls school will miss Lopez, a 1978 St. Mary's Academy graduate who is arguably the greatest female athlete in state history. Inducted into the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame in 2009, she was the school's athletic director for 35 years.

But St. Mary's Academy will chart a new path forward under Dames Smith, who comes to the school with glittering credentials.

In 2023, she was inducted into the athletics hall of fame at Linfield College, where she coached the women's tennis team (2004-14) to 108 consecutive conference wins and was named conference coach of the year four times.

She served as assistant athletic director at Concordia University for four years and Linfield for two years before spending the last seven years at the University of Portland, the final four as director for academic and student-athlete development.

Dames Smith said her time at the University of Portland was “super rewarding,” but she was ready to take on a new challenge. The chance to draw on her administration experience from Concordia and Linfield at the high school level was enticing.

“It's a changing landscape in higher education and college athletics right now,” she said. “I have seen some people leave for high school athletic director positions. So there was an intrigue there.”

Dames Smith said that St. Mary's Academy was “just absolutely the top of the list” of the positions she considered.

“There were so many things about the St. Mary's position that made it attractive to me to make that switch from higher education to high school,” she said. “A lot of the things I was doing in my background were all things that were in line with the direction St. Mary's is going with their athletic program.

“St. Mary's is such a storied position. A lot of that is attributed to Anna Maria and what she did at St. Mary's as an athlete, as a coach, as an athletic director. It's just an incredibly unique position, being an all-girls school. It just had a special appeal to me.”

Dames Smith was a tennis state tournament qualifier as a senior at Mountain View of Bend and successfully walked on to the team at the University of Portland. She graduated from Portland and returned years later to earn her master's degree.

St. Mary's Academy is the first high school job for Dames Smith since she began her career in education as a social studies teacher and assistant girls tennis coach at Evergreen of Vancouver.

Dames Smith will draw on her experience as a coach in her new position.

“I feel like I'm going to be working a lot more closely with the coaches,” she said. “I've walked in their shoes before. I know the unique pressures they're facing. I just want to be their No. 1 fan and support. In the last few weeks, I've been tapping into those coach roots, for sure.”

Dames Smith will head a new-look St. Mary's Academy athletic department. The school also has a new assistant athletic director in Kerry (Wright) Brown, a 2012 Sunset graduate who is in the Whitworth University athletics hall of fame as a javelin thrower.

In addition, Dames Smith will oversee the implementation of a holistic development program for student-athletes called RISE (resilience, involvement, self-discovery and empowerment). The school has hired Keira (McCarrell) Stinson, a West Salem graduate and former Auburn heptathlete, to oversee the daily execution of the program.

“We're going to be focusing on that holistic development, kind of like what I was doing at the University of Portland,” Dames Smith said. “This person is going to be out in the community, building partnerships, and working with student-athletes, providing life-skills programming for them. It's something that's incredibly unique to St. Mary's.”

Dames Smith lives in southwest Portland with her husband, Kenton. Their daughter, Riley, played softball at Jesuit and is a sophomore on the team at Denison University in Ohio.