Sports
Hendersonville celebrate sports complex coming to Berkeley Park
HENDERSONVILLE — Several dozen people gathered at Berkeley Park Nov. 18 for a pre-construction celebration for a new sports complex to be built on the 39-acre park property. The park is at 69 Balfour Road in Hendersonville.
Four soccer fields, six tennis courts, a softball field, and parking spaces are slated to be built on the site, providing space for high school teams to play and alleviating crowding at other local parks.
Work should be completed by the fall of 2026, Assistant County Manager Christopher Todd told the Hendersonville Times-News.
Billy Lesesne, a college recruiting coordinator with Highlands Football Club, said his organization, which serves children from ages 4-5 through senior year of high school, would welcome the chance to partner with local officials to offer soccer programming at the site. Existing fields at the Henderson County Athletics & Activities Center Park on Grove Street are usually fully booked by various soccer clubs, he said.
“It’s a great opportunity to work with a larger cohort of youth athletes,” Lesesne said.
Within Berkley Park there’s already a baseball field, the Berkeley Mills Ballpark, which was built in 1949 for the Berkeley Spinners, a team made up of people who worked at the neighboring Berkeley Mill.
For the past three years, the baseball field, also known as “The Orchard,” has been used by the Hendersonville Honeycrisps, a collegiate-level team that plays in the Old North State League. The baseball field will remain intact, and the Honeycrisps plan to continue to lease the site, team co-owner Kyle Aldridge said during the Nov. 18 ceremony.
Hendersonville High School’s sports teams will also use the fields.
Henderson County Commission Chair Rebecca McCall said during the ceremony that her uncle played for the Berkeley Spinners. She acknowledged that many trees would be lost when the sports complex is built, but said that the county commission has for years been trying to find suitable sites for additional recreation fields. She hoped the new facility would ease demand for fields at Jackson Park.
“Because if you’ve ever been out there on a Saturday when they’re playing both Little League and soccer, it’s overwhelming,” McCall said.
“If you go down there, it’s busy fall, spring,” Henderson County Commissioner William Lapsley told the Henderson Times-News, referring to Jackson Park. “There’s hundreds and hundreds of kids.”
He said that both high school athletics teams and the soccer community at Jackson Park have for years been asking for additional fields. He explained that the Kimberly-Clark Corp., which owns Berkeley Mill, donated Berkeley Park to the City of Hendersonville in 2008. The city transferred it to the county school board in exchange for a different parcel of land elsewhere in the city. The school board then asked the county for help building fields to accommodate school sports. The land was transferred to the county.
In 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act was signed into law by President Biden to boost the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. It included funding for municipalities to spend on qualifying projects. Henderson County got $22.8 million.
“It’s complex, but the ARPA money could be used for only certain things. One of those things was water and sewer,” Henderson County Manger John Mitchell told the Times-News.
More than two years ago, the Board of Commissioners designated more than $2 million of ARPA funds for the development of a sports complex. The county intended to apply millions more ARPA funds toward a sewer plant in Edneyville, but ultimately, there was not enough time in the regulatory process to do so, Mitchell explained.
So this summer, the Edneyville project was scaled back, and both state and ARPA were applied toward it. That maneuver freed up ARPA funding that could be added to the sports complex project.
“One of the ways that you could spend the ARPA money was in qualified census tracts for the promotion of health, and the well-being of children,” Mitchell said. The park project fit the criteria.
Todd said the total allotted for the park is $9.5 million. Projects funded by the American Rescue Plan Act have to be under contract by Dec. 31, so staff moved expeditiously, even through Tropical Storm Helene.
“I’m thrilled the project is happening,” Todd said.
“I was just amazed at what a jewel this place could be,“ Henderson County Public Schools Superintendent Mark Garrett said during the ceremony, “But that is not possible with just school funding. That takes community funding, That takes county funding. We do not tax. We do not have that authority. So we have to work in partnership.”
The county has already contracted with WithersRavenel for engineering services for the project and is currently accepting bids for construction through Nov. 25 at hendersoncountync.gov.
Deirdra Funcheon covers Henderson, Polk and Transylvania Counties. Got a tip? Email her at Dfuncheon@gannett.com.
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