Douglas rebuilds Wheeler Park with new pickleball courts and pavilion

After more than a year darkened by Hurricane Helene, Wheeler Park is being rebuilt as more than a repaired park. Douglas has tied the comeback to pickleball, keeping the existing tennis courts, ballfield and playground while adding pickleball courts beside the tennis complex and a group pavilion near the playground.

On April 16, Kevin Koeppler, chairman of the Community Foundation of Coffee County, announced funding and plans for the next phase of the restoration. The City of Douglas followed with an April 21 update that showed how the park’s recovery is being shaped by a mix of old community commitments and new public use. The foundation has already joined the city and Keep Douglas Beautiful to plant 70 new trees across Wheeler Park, giving the rebuild a shade and landscape layer that will matter in Georgia summers as much as the fresh concrete and fencing.

The park’s comeback has been years in the making. Around 2016, Curtis and Annie Farrar established the Wheeler Park Improvement Fund. In 2019, the Community Foundation of Coffee County partnered with Interface Studio LLC to create a new vision plan for Wheeler Park, but Hurricane Helene interrupted that work and left the site closed for more than a year. Douglas reopened the park on Nov. 17, 2025, with the walking track, pickleball courts, tennis courts and ballfield available again while some sidewalks and playground structures were still under repair.

That phased reopening is part of what makes Wheeler Park feel like a comeback story rather than a simple amenity upgrade. The city is not replacing tennis with pickleball. It is preserving the park’s existing racquet-sport identity and adding another court option next to it, a blended layout that reflects how many public parks are now trying to serve multiple user groups at once. The new shelter, designed by Melissa Humphries and inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and Francis Lott, is being built offsite and will be installed later.

Wheeler Park is one of 13 parks in Douglas, part of the Douglas-Coffee County Parks and Recreation Department’s broader push to improve recreation opportunities across Douglas and Coffee County. The city also credited the Curtis Farrar Foundation, the Douglas Lions Club, Harper & Company Builders and Statewide Engineering in the recovery effort, a sign that the rebuild is being carried by a local network as much as by city hall. The courts are already back in play, and the rest of Wheeler Park is returning piece by piece, from the 70 trees now going in to the pavilion and shelter still to come.