Tom Ames is a sports guy. Name a sport and there’s a good chance Ames has either played it or coached it… or at the very least, watched it at some point it his life.
Which is a good thing, because Ames’ love and knowledge of all things athletic will come in handy as he takes the reins of Hood River Valley’s sports programs as the high school’s new athletic director — a position that is kicking into high gear as the start of the fall sports season is rapidly approaching.
This summer, Ames took over for the previous athletic director, Keith Bassham, who retired at the end of the school year after 35 years of service in the district. Ames has worked at the high school since 1998, where up until recently he was a chemistry teacher as well as a coach.
Ames fell in love with sports from an early age growing up in the southwest Washington city of Kelso. Like many kids, he started out playing Little League and then expanded into other sports as he got older.
“I guess basically I started playing Little League when everybody else did — I was probably six or seven — and then I started getting involved in basketball and pretty much doing everything,” he recalls. “I played everything, pretty much, through high school; I was a football, basketball, baseball guy.”
After graduating Kelso High School though, Ames went back to his roots and primarily focused on baseball, playing two years at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Wash., and then two years at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He went back to get his teaching degree at Portland State University, where he coached, and also spent some time coaching at Linfield College.
Ames and his wife, Charlene, moved to the Gorge in 1990, where she taught in Gresham and he taught in The Dalles and coached girls basketball. He’s also coached a variety of sports at Brookings-Harbor High School, coached softball at Barlow, as well as sports through the local Community Ed program. In 1998, he came to HRV to teach chemistry and coach the boys basketball program (Charlene also now works at HRV, teaching the Pathways class). He has also coached softball at HRV, but hasn’t coached at HRV in the past couple years, his last gig being the girls basketball program in the 2012-13 season.
As of now, Ames isn’t planning on making changes to the position, noting that he’s still getting the lay of the land.
“For me right now it’s trying to figure out what that (position) is, partially. It’s kind of like being a stranger in a strange land. But, it’s about making sure we’re putting class programs on the field, that our coaches are all certified and quality people that are influencing our kids, because the reality for us, really, is that we’re trying to make great young women and men,” he explains. “The wins and losses are a byproduct of teaching kids about hard work and discipline — some of those values that are bigger than the sports arena.”
One thing that will eventually be changing, though likely not this year, is the HRVHS A.D. position expanding into middle school sports — a transition Ames said was set up by Bassham who’s “done a great job of helping our program grow.” Ames said the idea is to make district sports “a more cohesive program from (grades) 6 to 12, so that way, when a kid comes in as a freshman, you know that he knows these fundamentals.”
One big change that is planned for this school year doesn’t have anything to do with sports themselves, but rather how information about them is disseminated. For one, Ames says an upgrade to the athletic department’s website is in the not-too-distant future.
“We’re trying to upgrade our website so that we actually have an athletics website that is easy to use, so that when my grandma goes on to find out who’s playing, she doesn’t have to (go), ‘Whoa, how do I…’ so we’re trying to make things a little simpler, we’re trying to have a one-stop shop for all of our programs,” he says.
In addition to the refreshed website, Ames said the school is working on having an app developed in relation to the website that will provide up-to-date information uploaded by coaches in real time after the conclusion of the game.
“The communication part for our parents will be a lot better, because our coaches will be able to use their phones at the end of the game, put in a score and it will be immediately on the website and the banner up there,” he explains. “They can postpone a game and say, ‘This is the new time.’ It texts, it Facebooks, it Twitters. You do it once and it goes to all the websites.”
As much as he’s excited about upgrading the online presence of HRV athletics, Ames notes that isn’t the part of his job that he’s looking forward to the most.
“For one thing, I really like, just, sporting events. I’ll go and watch them, whether I’m doing this job or not; I’ll pretty much come to everything I can come to at the school, so having it be part of my job is, like, bonus for me,” he says. “I love watching kids perform and compete, so for me, that’s kind of a natural piece there.”
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