Hitting the goal: New community pocket park gives neighborhood youths safer play area

Landon Sims, Kaden Daniel Walker and Kerwin Hooper play tetherball Saturday at the Alpha Park grand opening block party in Texarkana, Ark.
Landon Sims, Kaden Daniel Walker and Kerwin Hooper play tetherball Saturday at the Alpha Park grand opening block party in Texarkana, Ark.

What was once a blighted residential lot just off Park Street in Texarkana, Ark., now sports a new look, complete with a concrete pad and basketball hoops.

 

Thanks to the efforts of two Arkansas-side police officers, dozens of the neighborhood's residents celebrated the grand opening Saturday of the Police Department's first-of-its-kind pocket park, known as the Alpha Park.

After years of receiving complaints about neighborhood kids playing basketball on a nearby street bordered by a dangerously sloped drainage ditch, Cpl. Randy McAdams and Officer Michael Bryan decided less than two years ago to do something positive and get a better connection established with children in the neighborhood.

"We started checking on potential resources, and we eventually started to acquire material necessary to build a basket pocket park," McAdams said. "This material was donated by local businesses either for free or at a greatly reduced price."

Starting early last year and working on their days off, McAdams and Bryan worked to build the park regardless of the weather-hot, dry, cold, windy or wet-after the project was approved by Texarkana, Ark., Board of Directors and the Police Department.

"This was our first project of this magnitude," McAdams said. "We had to make sure we went through the city to get its approval, as well as the blessings of our own Police Department. We were also familiar with the neighborhood area and the people. We started to get to know people here on a different level."

The task wasn't easy. The officers first had to clear the land of some trees and overgrown brush and bushes. The project also required some dirt work for the concrete pad, constructed professionally with donated concrete. The finished product covers nearly a whole city lot.

At the grand opening, McAdams thanked Discount Auto Glass for donations and several Anytime Fitness employees who came out to help cook and serve the hot dogs and potato chips. Pink Behind the Thin Blue Line helped secure a $1,000 government grant to build wood benches for the park, and members of Texarkana, Ark., Citizens Police Academy Alumni Association volunteered to help.

"When we first thought about starting this undertaking, we just thought about installing one basketball goal, but then as we thought more about it, the dreams got bigger, the ideas got bigger and eventually the project itself got bigger," McAdams said.

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