Anyone who walks the loop at French Park in the evening knows the shape of it by heart. The track circles the ballfields, dips past the tree line, and brings you back around near the parking lot in about the time it takes to finish a podcast segment. It's the kind of park where the same handful of retirees pass you twice, the same dads shag foul balls behind the backstop, and nothing has changed in years except which field the kids happen to be using that season.
That's about to change, and not in the way you'd expect from a town this size.
According to reporting from The Randolph Leader, the Town of Wedowee is adding two basketball courts and two dual-lined tennis and pickleball courts to French Park, with completion expected this fall. That alone is worth knowing if you live nearby. What's more interesting is where the courts are going, and what that placement says about how a small town keeps its recreation department moving without a bigger budget or a bigger park.
The Space Nobody Was Using
The new courts aren't going on some newly cleared lot at the edge of town. Recreation director Lance Daniel told the Leader the courts will sit beyond the left field fence of the park's newest baseball and softball field, inside the footprint of the walking track that already loops around it. In plain terms: the land was already spoken for. It just wasn't doing anything yet.
That field, the park's third multi-use youth baseball and softball diamond, made its competition debut in the spring of 2024. When the town built it, the walking track had to be routed wide enough to clear the outfield fence, which left a pocket of unused ground between the fence line and the track itself. A couple of years later, that leftover space is becoming four fenced courts.
It's a detail easy to skim past, but it's the whole story. Most towns talk about adding recreation space in terms of acreage: buying a new parcel, clearing timber, running utilities out to a fresh site. Wedowee didn't need to do any of that. The 2024 ballfield project effectively pre-built the footprint for the 2026 courts without anyone planning it that way at the time.
Two Sports, One Court, No New Building
The other detail worth sitting with is how the courts themselves are configured. Wedowee isn't building two basketball courts and then two separate, dedicated pickleball courts alongside two separate tennis courts. It's building two tennis courts that are also lined and netted for pickleball, so the same slab of asphalt serves both sports depending on who shows up and what net gets hung that day.
Here's what's actually going in, based on the town's plans as reported:
- Two basketball courts, side by side
- Two courts lined and netted for both tennis and pickleball
- All four courts fully fenced
That dual-lining choice mirrors the logic behind the ballfield next door. A multi-use youth field can host baseball one weekend and softball the next without anyone building a second diamond. The new courts follow the same math: one surface, two sports, no duplicate construction. For a park the local paper already describes as Wedowee's centerpiece recreational facility, that kind of stacking is how you keep adding without the price tag of adding.
A County First That Was Already in Demand
Once the courts open, Wedowee will have the first known public pickleball courts in Randolph County, according to the Leader's reporting. That's a real distinction, and it's worth asking whether there was actually demand for it or whether the town is building ahead of interest.
The answer points to demand that already existed with nowhere formal to go. PlayTime Scheduler, a free app pickleball players use to organize open-play sessions, already groups Ashland, Lineville, and Wedowee together as a single regional hub for arranging games, the same way it groups other Alabama areas like Alexander City and Lake Martin. That grouping doesn't happen because a town has courts. It happens because players in an area are already finding each other, whether that means driving to a neighboring county, taping lines on an existing tennis court, or coordinating informal games wherever a flat surface and a net can be found.
In other words, the players showed up before the courts did. French Park is catching up to something that was already happening at the edges of the county rather than trying to manufacture interest in a sport nobody was asking for.
The Pattern Underneath It
Step back and look at French Park's last couple of years as a single story instead of two separate news items. Spring 2024: a third multi-use ballfield opens, wide enough to require rerouting the walking track around it. Fall 2026 (expected): four new courts fill in the space that rerouting created, doubling as both a basketball complex and the county's first public pickleball facility, all without the town buying an inch of new ground.
That's not a coincidence of timing. It's a pattern. A recreation department working with a modest budget doesn't get to build a standalone tennis complex and a standalone pickleball complex and a standalone basketball gym. It gets one shot at a project, and it makes that project do as much work as possible. The ballfield expansion created leftover land almost as a side effect. The courts turn that side effect into new programming for an entirely different set of residents, from teenagers who want a pickup basketball game to the pickleball players who've been organizing their own games across Ashland, Lineville, and Wedowee without a dedicated court to call home.
For anyone who already calls Wedowee home, the practical upshot is simple. French Park is about to serve more people on the same acreage it's always had, and the fencing around the new courts means that corner of the park will feel more defined and more purpose-built than the open grass it used to be. If you walk that loop in the evenings, expect to hear paddles by the time the leaves turn.
For anyone weighing whether a town this size can keep growing its amenities without losing what makes it feel small, French Park is a decent answer. Growth here doesn't look like a new complex on the edge of town. It looks like a walking track that got a little more crowded, in the best possible way.
If you're already spending your evenings on that walking track, or you're thinking about what life around Lake Wedowee actually looks like day to day, that's the kind of on-the-ground detail I try to stay ahead of. Reach out to Bill Coats to schedule a free consultation about the lake, the towns around it, or what a move here might look like when you're ready.
