ULI’s – ULI Baltimore 9th WLI Dinner Series

In 2008, Carrie brought her extensive development experience to the Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation as the Sr. Director of Development. After 16 years with the Ripken Foundation, she now serves as the Chief Operating Officer overseeing the day-to-day operations. The Ripken Foundation has grown to impact over 1.4M underserved kids across the country across 46 states through a variety of efforts including building Youth Development Parks to give kids clean and safe places to play, installing over 500 STEM Centers, and running Badges for Baseball, a character education and life skills program that includes law enforcement officers as coaches and mentors. Carrie came to the Foundation from The Park School in Brooklandville, MD, where she served as the Director of Major Gifts, Planned Giving & Development Outreach. There she developed a planned giving program and major gifts/centennial campaign effort focused on building the endowment at Park. Carrie also enjoyed a nine-year tenure defined by effectiveness with the United Way of Central Maryland. As Associate Vice President, Major Gifts and Annual Campaign, her department generated more than $13 million annually in individual gifts representing 45% of the private sector campaign. She also created and launched the Women’s Initiative in 1998 to encourage charitable giving targeting women and the next generation of younger donors. For fun Carrie plays pickleball five days a week. Her proudest accomplishment is being the mother of Benjamin and Jamie, and dog Roxy.

Janet Patterson, an Associate at EwingCole, has spent the last 10 years as a Senior Project Manager providing leadership and management for a variety of projects in the sports, education, and science and technology markets. In her leadership role for the Sports & Entertainment group at EwingCole, she has been involved in the planning, design and construction of diverse sports facilities from corporate wellness/fitness centers, regional sports parks, and tennis complexes, to NFL training facilities and Minor League Baseball stadium improvements. Ms. Patterson graduated from The Ohio State University with a degree in architecture and began her career as a construction administrator for NBBJ. She spent the early part of her career as the sole female field representative on construction sites in her region. Among a challenging variety of projects, she oversaw and coordinated the construction of the Woody Hayes Athletic Facility, the premier football training center for The Ohio State Buckeyes. Most recently she was involved in the planning, design and construction of the Baltimore Raven Under Armour Training Facility Addition and Renovation. Working with a tight schedule and without disturbing player operations she successfully shepherded her team through three phases of construction over a three-year period. She is currently responsible for guiding the design team on an improvement project at Prince George’s Stadium, the home of the Bowie Baysox, and is involved in a sportsplex master planning effort in Laurel, Va.

Janet Marie Smith Founder/Executive Chair, Canopy Team In 2023, Janet Marie Smith and Fran Weld, formed Baltimore based “Canopy”, a woman-led company devoted to the design and management of sports projects and their surrounding developments. Dedicated to urban revitalization and community enrichment, Canopy specializes in large-scale projects which seamlessly blend sports, design, and urban planning as well as intimate scales within museums, retail, and public parks. Trained as architect and urban planner Janet Marie Smith is well known for her work on Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, which set the standard for a new wave of ballparks after its opening in 1992. Smith worked for the Orioles from 1989-94 as Vice President of Planning and Development during the design and construction of the park. She later re-joined the club from 2009-12 to direct renovations and expansion of the Orioles’ spring training facility in Sarasota, FL., and upgrades to Camden Yards. For the past 12 years, Smith has overseen the large-scale improvement/expansion projects at Dodger Stadium and Campo Las Palmas (the club’s home in the Dominican Republic). From modernizing the stadium to incorporating the club’s rich history into the ballpark experience, Smith’s fan-friendly touches have helped keep Dodger Stadium – the third-oldest ballpark in baseball – one of the premier venues in all of sports. Smith initially joined the Los Angeles Dodgers as a Senior Vice President in 2012 and was promoted to her current role as Executive Vice President of Planning and Development in 2020. Additionally, Smith has recently completed the planning and design for Polar Park in Worcester, home of the Worcester Red Sox, the Triple-A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. She has also conceived a series of short-term improvements to Stamford Bridge in London, the home of Chelsea Football Club, overseen the design of PNC Park improvements in Pittsburgh, and provided advisory services to Paris Basketball for their new home in Adidas Arena. From 2002-2009, Smith served as Senior Vice President of Planning and Development for the Boston Red Sox, overseeing the preservation and expansion of Fenway Park. Smith was President of Turner Sports and Entertainment Development and Vice President of Planning and Development for the Atlanta Braves from 1994-2000, when she helped transform the 1996 Olympic Stadium into Turner Field and guided the development of the Philips Arena (now State Farm Arena), home to the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. Outside of baseball, Smith has worked on development projects including Battery Park City in New York, unfulfilled plans for Pershing Square in LA, the redevelopment of former industrial buildings on Baltimore’s waterfront, as well as renovation plans for the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, CA. Smith was the Edward P. Bass Visiting Professor at Yale University School of Architecture during the Fall of 2017 and has served as a guest lecturer and critique for various other schools of architecture, including Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Morgan State University’s School of Architecture & Planning. In 2014, Smith was named one of WISE LA’s Women of Inspiration, inducted into the Sports Business Journal “Class of Champions” in 2017, and cited as one of the most powerful women in sports in 2019 by Ad Week. A native of Jackson, Miss., Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Mississippi State University and a master’s degree in urban planning from City College of New York. In 2020, she was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. “The three most important things that have happened in baseball since the Second World War were Jackie Robinson taking the field for Brooklyn in 1947, free agency arriving in 1975, and Orioles Park at Camden Yards opening in 1992… The last was an act of heroic nostalgia, but, then, baseball fans are disposed to live with cricks in their necks from looking backwards. Which is why Major League Baseball owes a debt to a willowy woman from Mississippi. To those who said, ‘You can’t turn back the clock,’ Janet Marie Smith responded with ‘Well, we’ll just see about that.’” – Will, George. A Nice Little Place on the North Side. Three Rivers Press, 2014 Headshot photo credits: Jon SooHoo, with the Los Angeles Dodgers