STARKVILLE – Second place isn’t good enough for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, General Manager Greg Owen told members of Starkville Rotary Club on Monday.

Officials want to be No. 1 in every endeavor, he said, requiring a nearly $40 million investment to help reach their ambitious goal.
Starkville contracts with Sports Facilities Companies to manage city parks and recreation.

Those improvements spurred higher park visitation rates and a $7 million increase in projected annual economic impact from 2025 to 2026, Owen said.

“We want to be No. 1 in all that we do,” Owen told Rotarians during the meeting at Hilton Garden Inn. “We want to be the No. 1 in Mississippi for parks and rec.”

Included in the most recent slate of park improvements were $7.1 million worth of work at McKee Park and about $2.4 million worth of paved parking and the turf “flat field” for football and soccer at the Sportsplex.

At Moncrief Pool, Owen said the department has updated locker rooms, bathrooms and the concession area.
At the Needmore Center, where a $2.3 million community center was built, a television has been installed to help with showing pictures at family reunions and presentations during small business meetings. The department is planning to figure out how to use that area for tailgating in the future to take advantage of the center’s convenient proximity to Davis Wade Stadium.
“If I remember my measurements right, I think it’s eight-tenths of a mile from the door of the Needmore Center to the ticket entry at Davis Wade,” Owen said. “It just seemed like an ideal place for tailgates, so we’re going to be putting together a (tailgating) package.”
Looking forward, Owen said the Sportsplex Annex is set for a facelift.
“We’ll be adding new roofing coming soon within the next couple of weeks or so,” he said. “… We’ll adjust and have new flooring, new walls and new windows. It’ll be a nice place for people to have business meetings, family gatherings, those types of things.”
Work has also begun on the soccer fields at the Sportsplex, Owen said. The fields have received eight 22-ton loads of mason sand to prevent their surfaces from becoming shocked with water, keeping fewer games from getting rained out. The fields will be complete and ready for operation again on Sept. 1, although Owen said tournaments have yet to be scheduled for this year.
More mid-term goals include adding an arboretum at Cornerstone Park and a skate park at the Sportsplex. Owen said the construction will begin on the skate park this winter.
Along with these updates, Owen said, comes a projected increase in visitors to each park, as tracked by Placer.ai, and a more than $21 million projected economic impact this fiscal year, up from $14 million during Fiscal Year 2025.
Much of that impact comes from tournaments hosted in the city, Owen said, like the three-day DC Elite softball tournament that brought 13,667 visitors to Starkville this month, many of which dined at nearby restaurants. July is normally a low month for economic impact, he said.
“We basically were able to hand Walk On’s about 550 more customers, just that restaurant alone,” Owen said.