Designing a site, adding a playground, and selecting and placing site furnishings requires careful consideration. From play spaces that educate and engage youth to aesthetically pleasing spots for engaging with nature, facility managers must carefully consider current trends in their communities and beyond to ensure their parks have impact.

As more and more parks and recreation facilities add splash play elements, the designs of these fun-in-the-sun elements get ever more innovative. We take a look at how this cool trend is heating up.

The benefits of recreation, fitness and sports facilities are myriad, but not everyone has easy access to those benefits. This month, we offer up three great examples from California to show how you can reach out to these underserved areas.

Climbing may attract a specific niche of recreation fans to your facility, but there are ways to ensure that niche is as wide as possible. We consider the basics of indoor climbing: who you should be targeting and what kinds of walls work.

In the fun and excitement of considering the latest bells and whistles, proper attention to one of the recreation center’s most important features—the control desk—is sometimes overlooked.

As multipurpose facility flooring must combat never-ending traffic and provide adequate support, it is imperative for specifiers to understand the need for a high-performance solution adaptable to multiple activities.

Experts from Skaters for Public Skateparks offer advice and tips on getting the site right.

Learn how to turn daily interactions between lifeguards and aquatic facility managers into learning experiences that can drastically reduce the need for in-service training during non-working hours.

When Canada geese and ring-billed gulls became a problem at Chicago’s beaches on Lake Michigan, the park district took a multi-pronged approach to clean things up.

When a recreation programmer in Keene needed a program he could implement quickly and economically to combat childhood obesity in his part of the state, he turned to the tried-and-true CATCH Kids Club.