By Joshua Manning
This issue, our Wellington History series travels back to a time before Wellington had parks and recreational facilities considered among the best in the state. Just two months after the inaugural Wellington Village Council was seated, they approved plans for Village Park, but the story begins much earlier.
It was a historic moment in May 1996 when the inaugural Wellington Village Council approved the newly incorporated community’s first major municipal development — a park complex including sports fields and a gymnasium/recreation center. The decision created what is now known as Village Park at 11700 Pierson Road. The total cost of the first phase was an estimated $6.2 million.
Village Park today is so woven into the fabric of life in Wellington that imagining a community without it is difficult. But Wellington in the mid-1990s was a community with a booming population of families and precious few sports fields. The population had grown from about 5,000 residents in 1980 to more than 20,000 in 1990, and the need for recreation facilities soared.
The decision to build the park was made by a council that had been seated just two months earlier, but it was the culmination of six years of discussion and work by Wellington’s pre-incorporation government, the Acme Improvement District, and scores of recreation activists with big dreams.
The need for more recreation facilities in Wellington long predated the village’s incorporation on Dec. 31, 1995.
At an Acme-hosted public forum in May 1995, as reported in the Town-Crier, leaders from local sports leagues noted that Wellington was far behind its neighboring communities in providing recreational facilities for children and adults, which was hampering the growth of sports programs and forcing residents to leave the community.
The goal of the forum was to convince Acme supervisors to finance a large recreation complex on Pierson Road, which would be the first phase of a much larger facility that would eventually be needed.
It was part of an ongoing discussion with ups and downs. A year earlier, voters turned down a larger $13 million parks and recreation proposal. However, moving forward, Acme officials said that perhaps a smaller complex would be more successful. Recreation leaders at the time suggested perhaps a $3 to $4 million facility.
At that 1995 forum, Bruce DeLaney, who would later serve as Wellington’s longtime parks and recreation director before his retirement, said that the basketball program he was running had 500 children and no Acme facilities for basketball. “We are completely dependent on the high school,” he told the Acme supervisors at the time.
Ken Koch, who ran the local softball program, said that Wellington’s recreational facilities were woefully lacking, adding that he had only one field for 13 teams to share. Western Communities Football League President Joe Piconcelli added that the situation is also dire for football and baseball players, where hundreds of kids had left the community to play.
It did not fall on deaf ears. Acme supervisors generally supported building a large sports complex but were hampered by financial concerns.
“We were trying to figure out a master plan for the community, and obviously the needs for sports fields kept coming up,” recalled Kathy Foster, then an Acme supervisor and later the first mayor of Wellington. “We had to identify a large parcel of land available to the village for fields.”
Foster explained that the board did not want to divide it up, putting one or two fields for individual sports on tiny pieces of land all across the community.
“We had to find one piece of land that could accommodate multiple sports, and everything the committee looked at kept coming back to the Village Park site,” Foster said. “There was nothing even close to it.”
There were problems with the site though. At the time, it was designated for overflow from the nearby water treatment plant, but Acme’s engineers eventually decided that use was unlikely to be needed.
“At the time, we didn’t really need the size of it, but we would over the long term,” Foster noted.
There was also an issue with the location.
“At the time the park was instituted, the population was focused along Forest Hill Blvd. and Big Blue Trace,” Foster said. “Access to the park was still the major issue.”
This included not only the distance from the population center, but also a road getting to the park.
“We didn’t have the right of way,” Foster recalled. “It was not designed as an access road for a major park. However, we were able to widen it enough to legally have a two-lane road access.”
And then there were objections from the park’s immediate neighbors. In April 1996, Palm Beach Polo homeowners began a last-minute campaign to stop the proposed park on Pierson Road. “The people who lived near the park were very much opposed to it,” Foster said.
However, officials in the newly incorporated village vowed to continue with the large park project.
“It was a long haul, but we didn’t have a lot of options,” Foster continued. “We knew that we would eventually want to build a gymnasium and more, and nothing we had available could accommodate that.”
She specifically noted the work of recreation activists Valerie McKinlay and Dick Palenchat to keep the park project moving forward, as well as Debbie Brisson, an Acme board member who supported the park project and later became the new village’s parks and recreation director.
Groundbreaking ceremonies were held for the planned recreation center at Village Park in October 1996. Fields at the new park opened a year later in October 1997, followed three months later, in January 1998, by the new recreation center building. This completed the first phase of the facility, which the village has been adding to ever since.
Thousands of residents attended the opening ceremony to celebrate the community’s first large sports facility. That first phase brought pavilions, concession stands, two roller hockey rinks, two softball/baseball fields, four football/soccer fields and a 25,000-square-foot gymnasium that included classrooms and offices for recreation staff.
Today, Village Park remains Wellington’s main regional park and athletic facility, encompassing more than 114 acres. The original recreation center has been expanded twice, once in 2005 and again in 2013, and now includes 75,000 square feet of space, including two full-sized basketball courts and additional activity space.
The park also contains a covered hockey rink, 19 multipurpose athletic fields, six concession stands, three playgrounds, two miles of lighted recreational trails and four picnic pavilions. It’s Wellington’s largest public gathering space, hosting events such as the village’s annual Fourth of July celebration and fireworks show. It even has a stickball setup that is home to the Wycliffe Stiffs stickball league.
While the sports programs draw crowds of athletes of all ages, another popular draw is the Peaceful Waters Sanctuary near the park’s back entrance off 120th Avenue South. This passive preserve was created in partnership with the village’s water utility. The 30-acre wetlands park with 1,500 feet of elevated boardwalks and one mile of walking trails is home to a variety of animals and plant species native to South Florida. Bird watchers, in particular, love visiting Peaceful Waters for the wide avian diversity.
And in 2025, Village Park is slated to get two major upgrades. Currently under construction at the park’s south end are the village’s new aquatics complex with both a recreational pool area and a competition pool area. Also, Jon Bostic’s Wellington Athletics group is building the new Wellington Sports Academy high-end training facility at the park as part of a public-private partnership.
“I think it is amazing. Thousands of children are participating there from sunrise to sunset,” Foster said, looking back nearly 30 years later. “I am so glad the council and the recreation committee had the foresight to put aside all this land. We have definitely maximized the use of that land, which is wonderful.”
