Fieldhouse, Baby!
Fieldhouse
EPRD staff presented tentative plans for the Buchanan Fieldhouse to the club board this past Tuesday. They’ll be presenting those plans to the EPRD board on Wednesday the 22nd. If approved by the board, things (permitting, utilities, builder stuff) get underway now with actual construction of the fieldhouse starting possibly early 2027! God willing and the creek don’t rise, we might have a new fieldhouse with 3 primary and 3 secondary pickleball courts sometime in the coming year.
Below is what we tentatively know so far. The EPRD board meeting Wednesday is open to the public if you’d like to see the full presentation. Did you notice the tentative and maybe above? All of this is subject to change depending on what the board says, whether they can get the extra funding they need for this best-case plan, how all the rest of the massive changes at Buchanan proceed, what feedback and input they get from all the various groups that would be using this building (that’s us and others, the EPC board will be collecting your input to present to EPRD, stay tuned), and that rendering is just a concept, not the finished product.
The field house is divided into three zones. You can kind of see this in the attached rendering.
Zone 1 will be a turf field, pictured at the far end.
Zone 2 in the middle will be a surface similar to Marshdale with 3 pickleball courts - no other lines. This will be a multi-use space though. Things like a batting cage that can be lowered down from the ceiling, a pole vault thingie was mentioned, etc other uses.
Zone 3 will be a hardwood court surface like Wulf. It will have basketball, volleyball, and pickleball lines giving us another three courts.
They envision a RFID system to access the building so select people other than EPRD staff will be able to open the building for use.
They are about $750,000 short of the funding they need to do everything they want. They will be doing fundraising to close that gap. Adjustments may be made depending on how that goes.
Naming rights are available if you've got a spare million.
Tentatively, possibly, maybe, hopefully.
Other EPRD News
We saw the rendering of the pool, but you can’t play pickbleball in a pool so who cares. It does look very nice.
All the other Buchanan improvements - pavilion, skatepark, new play area, new parking (going from 170 to nearly 400), new roads - are all underway.
Wulf is getting new pickleball nets that we are picking out.
The North side of the Marshdale courts are going to change from that dirt path to concrete. We’ll be able to go around and use that middle gate like we do on the South side. Like we all do. All the time.
