Finding a place to play

City works to meet demand for parks

Orginally published August 15, 2001

Marcus Mollins is a little bummed out.

It's 4 p.m. on a slightly balmy summer day, and the 24-year-old college intern for the Lacey Parks Department is helping set up for volleyball league games at Wonderwood Park.

A dozen nets have to go up, and a table is scattered with score sheets and league standings and supplies.

Mollins is enjoying it just fine, except for one thing: He'd rather be playing.

"By the time I got out here (from Minnesota), all the league sign-ups were done," says Mollins, who is majoring in recreation management at North Dakota State University.

It's hard to watch the adult volleyball players having fun -- "Wait 'till you see them; they get pretty competitive," he says -- and not join in.

Late afternoon is a quiet, in-between time at the city's parks, with the day-camp children having gone home, and the families and league athletes not yet swarming out of their homes and offices to enjoy outdoor time.

But the crowds that use the city's parks are growing, and Lacey officials are working to develop more parks to accommodate them.

The city has 22 parks covering 461 acres, yet it has developed just five parks totaling 70 acres, says Parks Director Jim Sheler.

A bond issue of less than $10 million to develop city parks will go before Lacey voters next March. A $14 million bond issue to pay for park development failed in 1999 by fewer than 50 votes, and the city is getting ready to try again with a smaller bond.

It would bring picnic tables and shelters, playground equipment, walking trails, rest rooms, and athletic fields to 15 different parks in the city. The first phase of a sports complex, a partnership between Lacey and Thurston County, will break ground on the edges of the city near Steilacoom Road next year, and the bond would help fund the second phase of the complex.

But, for now, the city is managing with its 70 acres.

By 6 p.m., the parks are in full swing again.

At Huntamer Park in the heart of the city, storyteller Tom Daily stands in front of a Native American button blanket and entertains his audience of children and parents with a story about "salmon boy," who must go on a long journey of life and death to learn to respect the water and the salmon.

The small park is literally blanketed with dozens of families spread out on comforters, eating picnic dinners. Some mothers chase younger children across the park's stage.

Marisa Hughes and her 4-year-old daughter, Sidney, have come from Olympia for the story-telling, one of a series of children's events the city and Lacey businesses host on several Tuesday nights each summer.

"It's a great way to get the family together. It's a chance to get out," Hughes says. "We run into a lot of people we know."

The family of Jim and Laura Scheffer has come to Tuesday kid nights for years. Eight adults and children sit or roam around the park, having stopped first at McDonalds for dinner.

"It's free entertainment, the kids love it, it's good healthy air, and there's no bad elements here," says Jim, 59, who owns Creative Discovery and Day Care Center with his wife.

A few miles away at Wonderwood, the co-ed Grass League volleyball players are in full spike mode.

Members of the Atomic Wedgies, the Court Jesters, the Grasshoppers, the Y-ners, the Unrealistic Assumptions, the Sandy Shorts and many more teams are leaping and dashing about their grass "courts," outlined in yellow rope.

Stacey Crawford from Rochester and Tammy Williams from Olympia are having a good night. Their team, the Spikes, is winning its fourth game in a row.

At another grass court, Debbie Imamura is playing next to her 23-year-old son, Michi, but their team will rack up only one win out of four games. Imamura, who lives in Olympia, likes the fast pace and teamwork of the game.

While the volleyball competitors are finishing up their matches, a family on bicycles is stopping a few miles away at small Lake Lois Park off Carpenter Road.

It's about 7:40 p.m. now, and 10-year-old Alicia Hargrove is out in the muddy, wetland edges of the lake trying to retrieve an orphaned fishing pole. But when the mud reaches her knees, Alicia turns back.

Father Steve Hargrove teases her about quitting.

"Look at me!" Alicia says, pointing to the mud on her legs. Father, daughter and mother, Joan, enjoy a break at the picnic table and along the walking trails.

Avid fishers and swimmers, the Lacey residents would like more access to lakes if parks could be developed.

"The parks are beautiful," Steve says. "I think they just need to work on the parks they have."

The Olympian Copyright 2001

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