BRADY FLANIGANStaff Writer

More rumblings at Waggoner Park this week. Something is shuffling around dirt nobody wants shuffled, and the city has called in the boots—the Tennessee Army National Guard—to trifle with it. It’s a sly beast: water. Years of expansions to the Tullahoma Industrial Park, which sits adjacent to Waggoner, prior to the imposition of storm water regulations has led to a growing problem of run-off eroding large ditches into the ground. With the park experiencing record high usage due to the Cal Ripken Baseball League, Frank Mullins Youth Football League, and 20+ annual Travel Baseball and Softball Tournaments, Tullahoma Parks & Rec Department has requested aid from the 230th Engineer Battalion to expand parking and improve drainage. 

The extra boots come as a part of the Guard’s Community Assistance Project, a program where the Army National Guard provides support, essentially free of cost, to local communities who meet some relatively basic requirements. The two primary prerequisites being the city’s consent to carry insurance for the project and assume liability in the event of mishaps. The project not only functions to aid local communities, but it offers hands-on training to troops with adjacent specialties, such as an engineer battalion. 

At Monday, March 23rd’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting, City Administrator Jason Quick said, “I think this idea was brought to me over a year ago, and I thought ‘boy that sounds too good to be true, but it is exactly that’. The Army National Guard are looking to donate in excess of $160,000 worth of materials and surveying and groundwork. That’s what it would cost us if we were to go out and do this on our own dime.” 

The project at Waggoner will focus on drainage preparation, detention, excavation, erosion control, berm construction, and parking/driveway preparation. It will also include some refurbishment to the press box/concession, which is in need of carpentry. 

The only thing excluded from the project is the cost of the city’s materials. In this case that means drainage tile and gravel, amounting to a high-end estimate of around $35,000, according to Parks & Rec Director J.P Kraft.

The project would install a retention pond along the first bend of Waggoner Memorial Park if you’re entering from Hwy 55 to deal with storm surges, expand parking for Waggoner Field, install drainage tile, install drainage tile to eliminate ponding water, grade a roadway to the batting cages, add additional parking or an ADA connection to the pavilion, and remove the gravel access to Mullins Field and the pavilion.

The request passed 6-0 with little controversy and is budgeted for fiscal year 2026.