If you've driven past Dugan Best Park recently and done a double take, you're not imagining things. The two tennis courts that sat behind the recreation center for decades are gone. In their place: a half basketball court with a nine-foot youth rim, a street soccer lane, an obstacle course you can also use as exercise equipment, and a gaga ball pit that the neighborhood kids apparently lobbied hard for.
This isn't a story about a park getting bigger. Owensboro didn't buy new land this year. What changed is how the city is using the acreage it already owns, and that shift is happening in more than one place at once.
The Math Behind the Disappearing Nets
The Dugan Best conversion wasn't a random renovation. It was a direct response to a number the Parks & Recreation Department was watching closely: tennis court usage. When the Owensboro Tennis Complex opened, it pulled players away from the neighborhood courts scattered around the city. Parks & Recreation Director Amanda Rogers put it plainly when the project was first proposed: the addition of the Owensboro Tennis Complex meant less usage at Dugan Best, and the same drop showed up at Kendall-Perkins.
Rather than let two underused courts sit there, the department spent months building something else. The process started with a public meeting in August 2024, followed by input sessions with the Dugan Best Neighborhood Alliance and, notably, the kids who actually use the rec center every day. One court became a youth basketball half court that doubles as street soccer and futsal space. The other became a free-play zone with an obstacle course, hopscotch, four square, and the gaga ball pit. A swimming pool was floated early in the process and rejected, since Dugan Best sits close enough to Cravens Pool that a second pool would have been redundant.
The ribbon cutting got rained out last November, but the space opened anyway. Rogers said the kids who use the center had one question the whole time construction was underway: "When can we get out there?"
Same Trade at Moreland Park
Moreland Park went through a nearly identical calculation. A former basketball court there is now a dedicated pickleball court, built to meet demand for a sport that's grown faster than almost any other in the country over the past few years. At the same time, a brand-new outdoor basketball court opened near the parking lot that connects to the Edge Ice Center, so the city didn't just swap one sport for another. It added a court where there wasn't one and repurposed a court where demand had shifted.
Line up Dugan Best and Moreland side by side and a pattern emerges. Owensboro isn't expanding its recreational footprint through acquisition. It's running an ongoing audit of which surfaces are being used and which aren't, then rebuilding the underused ones around whatever residents are actually asking for.
Ben Hawes Park Stops Being Owensboro's Secret
The same logic shows up on a bigger scale at Ben Hawes Park, home to the Rudy Mines Trails. These trails have a longer backstory. After a 2009 ice storm wrecked the original mountain bike paths, the city put up $25,000 to rebuild them, reopening in May 2012 with help from the Kentucky Mountain Bike Association and Spectrum Trail Design. Over the years since, that investment has grown into a trail system covering nine miles, mixing wide, forgiving doubletrack for beginners with faster, technical singletrack for riders who want it.
For most of that history, Rudy Mines was a local riders' trail. This year it became something else: a race destination that pulls people into Owensboro from outside the county.
In July, the trails hosted their first Rudy Rumble Trail Run, a new 10K with a companion one-mile kids run, timed with a chip system and backed by Owensboro Tourism. Later that same month, Rudy Mines hosted its second consecutive stop on the Bluegrass Mountain Cup, a statewide cross-country mountain bike series that runs from May through October across Kentucky, with stops in cities from Campbellsville to Prestonsburg. More than 70 riders registered for the 2026 race, some from as far as Louisville, Paducah, and Morganfield. Series race director Josh Patton described the Rudy Mines course as having a good rolling flow, twisty and windy in the way that keeps a ride interesting, and pointed to Owensboro's hotels and downtown food and beverage scene as part of what makes the city work as a race stop, not just a race location.
That's a different kind of value than a new play structure. It means people who don't live here are now building a weekend around Owensboro's trail system, the same trail system locals have had access to since 2012.
What Ties It Together
None of this required new parkland. The David C. Adkisson Greenbelt makes the same point on a citywide scale: 16.5 miles of paved path already linking neighborhoods, schools, and parks across Owensboro, built years ago and still doing the work of connecting the city without a single new mile added this year. The city keeps finding new uses for infrastructure it already paid for.
Even outside the parks department, that pattern held in 2026. Moneta Sleet Jr. Park, a small neighborhood park honoring the Owensboro-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, was added to the Kentucky African American Heritage Trail this spring after a community push led by local advocates and the Northwest Neighborhood Alliance. The park itself didn't change. Its designation did, and that alone is expected to bring new visitors to a site that's been part of the neighborhood for years.
Put it all together and the throughline is consistent. Owensboro's recreational map didn't grow outward this year. It got denser. The same courts, the same trails, and the same green space are doing more work than they were twelve months ago, because the city keeps paying attention to what residents are actually asking for and rebuilding around it instead of starting from scratch somewhere new.
Where to See It for Yourself
A few places worth a visit if you haven't been recently:
- Dugan Best Recreation Center, 3900 W 5th Street Rd, for the new street soccer, basketball, obstacle course, and gaga ball space
- Moreland Park, for the new pickleball court and the basketball court near the Edge Ice Center
- Rudy Mines Trails at Ben Hawes Park, 137 Overstreet Rd, for a ride on the same course the Bluegrass Mountain Cup used this July
- The Adkisson Greenbelt, with parking access points at Jack C. Fisher Park, Miller's Mill Road, and several other trailheads around the city
- Moneta Sleet Jr. Park, now part of the statewide Kentucky African American Heritage Trail
If watching how a city reshapes the space it already has tells you anything, it's that Owensboro's neighborhoods keep changing in ways that reward paying attention. EPIC Realty, led by broker-owner Jennifer Staser, spends its days doing exactly that kind of watching, block by block and season by season. If you're curious how any part of this city fits your own next move, schedule a free consultation and we'll walk through it together.
