The Fort Smith Parks Commission held a regular meeting on December 4, 2026, at 6:00 PM. The meeting included an annual report from the West Arkansas Tennis Association (WATA), a discussion on Creekmore Park mini golf private party fees, updates on capital projects, and a preview of the upcoming public input session for the ACME property master plan. Commissioners also reviewed recent park events and budget constraints affecting future programming.
Alright, I'm going to get started. What we want to do with December. Parks are right meeting. Appreciate all you do. And the staff or just a little appreciation we showed them. So yeah, thank you for all they do. So let's just jump in. I'll have the approval minutes from the previous meeting for October. If I had a two stick with those. Yes. I'm sorry. Alright, we got a motion, then a second on that. All favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed. Suppose one approved. We got is an annual port from Wada. Okay. Oh man. Right up here. You want me to stand here, stand up there wherever you want. Wherever you want. I don't know if you have a point at anything on that. Um not really. I'll stand over here. You can walk around if you want to. Anyway, yeah, thank you so much for letting us come and uh talk to you guys. Uh I met a lot of you last year, but I'm Doug Ross, executive director for West Arkansas Tennis Association. And we have a little bit of our fan club here today. We have our some of our board members, our tennis pro over there. But anyway, yeah, we appreciate the partnership we have with you guys to be able to manage Creek Moore tennis courts, and it's just a pleasure, and I'm glad to be here just to give you a little bit quick recap of the year and everything else. So next slide. I I think most of you were here last year. Um, and this is just a recap in case you don't know what Wada is all about. I'm not gonna go through kind of all the word salad there, but you know, we're a nonprofit 5013 that just has a mission of developing and promoting tennis growth in western Arkansas. And we do this, like I said, we manage the courts here and provide you know a basically a wonderful experience for anybody that comes to Creekmore courts to play tennis. We do tournament, socials, mixers, camp slinks, and especially a lot of private uh instruction for people that want to you know prove playing tennis. We work closely with all the schools. There's big elementary school, third grade program that we do out here, as well as like North Side is the home uh school practice and place matches here at uh Creekmoor Park. And then we do a lot of neat community outreach programs with the FCI youth camp and uh community connections is a great program because they work with uh wheelchair and uh adaptability uh usually kids but sometimes adults, but we also programs where they can get out and learn to kind of socialize with motor skills and just a neat chance for them to experience the game of tennis. And then also we do several tournaments in which we partner with local charities such as Ronald McDonald House, Project Compassion, West Darks of LA, uh Mental Health Awareness Council, and Don Reynolds. So we try and give back with a lot of our tournament funds that we raise. So next slide. And I'll just with the circle there, I'll start in the top left. The UST adult leagues. We had close to a thousand participants this year, and those are basically USDA run programs, usually in a team format of men's and women's doubles or mixed doubles different ways, but it's a very organized league, and again, just excited to have almost a thousand people participate. To the right of that uh tournaments, we had roughly 14 local tournaments or mixed socials and had uh over 600 people participate in those, so that was uh pretty exciting. The bottom right, uh here's where we do so much over here at Creekmore with the private instruction between just individual lessons clinics and uh a few camps and stuff. We had almost 1,500 people that came over and you know learn get better at tennis here. So pretty awesome there.