Oklahoma City approves $5.1M Booker T. Washington Park overhaul with three pickleball courts
Short answer: OKC Council approved final MAPS 4 plans for Booker T. Washington Park: three pickleball courts outnumbering tennis, as part of a $5,134,560 package with construction starting in December.
Pickleball's march into the default American park plan continued this month, this time in Oklahoma City. The City Council approved final plans for a 5.1 million dollar overhaul of Booker T. Washington Park in northeast OKC, and the court count tells its own story: three pickleball courts, two tennis courts and four basketball courts, with pickleball outdrawing tennis in a flagship public park.
What the council approved
The final plans for the park at NE 4th Street and N High Avenue, reported October 19 by the Journal Record and circulated by the city this week, cover far more than courts. The approved package includes four basketball courts, two tennis courts, three pickleball courts, a futsal court, a playground, a splash pad, shade structures, seating, artificial turf berms, a hammock and reading nook, a plaza and new signage. Construction is scheduled to begin in December.
The design comes from Kimley Horn of Oklahoma City, the firm behind the first phase of the MAPS 4 Neighborhood and Community Parks project, which spans 14 neighborhood parks and five community parks across the city. Booker T. Washington Park is one of the community-park flagships in that first phase.
How it compares
Scale the OKC plan against what other cities approved this year and its place in the pack is clear. Columbus, Georgia is spending 8.4 million dollars on a dedicated 21-court complex, a single-purpose bet on tournament tourism. Smaller towns have typically landed in the one to two million dollar range for standalone court clusters of six to eight. Oklahoma City's approach is different from both: pickleball embedded as one amenity among many, funded inside a parks program that touches every neighborhood in the city rather than a single destination site. For local players the dedicated complexes make headlines, but the distributed model is arguably the healthier one for everyday access, because it puts courts within a short drive of far more residents.
The money behind it
The total budget for the Booker T. Washington Park improvements is 5,134,560 dollars, including 650,000 dollars carried over from a 2017 general obligation bond. The rest comes through MAPS 4, Oklahoma City's debt-free capital program funded by a temporary penny sales tax that voters approved in a special election on December 10, 2019. The tax took effect April 1, 2020 and runs through 2028, projected to raise about 1.07 billion dollars over eight years.
MAPS 4 dedicates 70.3 million dollars to improving every neighborhood and community park in the city, which is the envelope this project draws from. More than 70 percent of the whole MAPS 4 program is earmarked for neighborhood and human needs, with the remainder funding quality-of-life and job-creation projects. Oversight runs through the MAPS 4 Citizens Advisory Board and its six subcommittees, with the City Council holding final authority, and a dedicated trust building a long-term funding plan for operating and maintaining what gets built.
Why three pickleball courts matters
A decade ago, a park plan like this would have been tennis courts plus basketball, full stop. The approved mix, four basketball, three pickleball, two tennis, is a quiet milestone: pickleball is no longer an amenity cities add under pressure from racket clubs; it is a default line item that outnumbers tennis in a major metro's flagship neighborhood-park program. That pattern has shown up across 2026 in city budgets from Georgia to Massachusetts, and Oklahoma City is now on the same list.
The park itself is a meaningful venue for the statement. City officials describe Booker T. Washington Park as a long-standing community anchor in northeast OKC, and the improvements are framed as serving the neighborhood first: play, events and sports for all ages, in the program manager's words.
What officials are saying
"Booker T. Washington Park is an important community anchor and gathering space in northeast OKC, and we're bringing improvements that will enhance the park for people of all ages to enjoy," MAPS Program Manager David Todd said in the city's announcement. "MAPS 4 included dedicated funding for this park to transform key recreational areas for play, events, sports and more."
OKC Parks Director Melinda McMillan-Miller struck the longer view: "We hope the legacy of this park and its importance to northeast Oklahoma City will be enjoyed for years to come. We know it will be a focal point and serve as a gathering place for members of the community."
The honest caveat
Three courts is meaningful as a signal but modest as supply. Oklahoma City's pickleball demand, like every fast-growing market's, is measured in waiting lists and prime-time court queues, and three unlighted neighborhood-park courts will not change that arithmetic on their own. The plans released so far do not detail court lighting or reservation systems, and the city has not announced programming such as leagues or lessons for the new courts. This is one piece of a parks-wide modernization, not a dedicated pickleball complex, and players hoping for tournament-scale infrastructure should keep expectations calibrated.
What to watch
Construction starts in December, with no published completion date yet. The details worth tracking are the ones that determine how playable the courts actually are: lighting for evening play, fencing and windscreens, and whether OKC Parks layers organized programming onto the new space. With 18 more parks in the MAPS 4 first phase alone, the bigger question is whether pickleball appears in the rest of the portfolio at the same ratio it earned here.
Sources
Sources checked 20 Oct 2026. Header image is illustrative, not a photo of the events described.
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