What is parks and recreation? It’s children playing a baseball game.

It’s a senior citizen learning to ballroom dance. It’s a casual stroll to enjoy nature or to exercise the body.

It’s a young mother with her child in a swimming class. It’s a community center that offers the family a hub of activity. This list could be exhaustive and still not cover all that the field of parks and recreation has to offer.

Parks provide space to play and learn, space to create and imagine and space to be safe and secure. The work of parks and recreation professionals plays a key role in creating communities.

The Americus-Sumter County Parks and Recreation Department is working hard to provide many of these things to the citizens. The late spring and summer are the busiest times of year. The youth baseball league is coming to a close, the adults’ softball program is about to get started, summer employment applications are being evaluated and registration for day camp and swimming lessons are ongoing through late May.

While all of this is happening, major renovation projects are occurring as well. The Rucker Street Pool Building has been gutted, re-roofed, new drains installed, new partitions built in the dressing rooms, ceramic tile installed, and a clean new exterior and paint is being added in the coming days.

This is the first of many changes that will happen in the Boone Park area. Citizens are excited about the new community center which will be located in the former Gertrude Davenport Building on the corner of U.S. Highway 19 North and Rucker Street.

It will feature a state of the art gymnastics facility, two basketball gyms, a splash pad, indoor walking track and a professional office complex. To go along with the building renovations, Boone Park will receive a facelift as well.

The walking track will be expanded and resurfaced. Old storage and bathroom buildings will be torn down and additional picnic shelters erected in their place.

There will be additional playground equipment added and much more to make Boone Park one of the most well-rounded facilities in the region. In Leslie, a new picnic pavilion and sign have been added to the Tinley Anderson swimming pool, adjacent to the Leslie Civic Center.

Barnum Pond has been restocked with fish and closed to public fishing for over a year. On Memorial Day weekend, this facility will re-open to senior citizens and their guests to enjoy a clean area to fish.

The Regional Park nature trail is open to the public and provides a 1.9 mile area to walk or ride BMX style bicycles. Five public swimming pools will open on June 2 to allow citizens in Americus, Leslie and Plains to cool off on hot summer days.

To find out more about what is happening at the ASCPRA, call (229) 924–4878 or visit www.ascpra.org.