Mylan Park celebrates 25 years of transformation, from mine reclamation to recreational haven.
When a school system transitions from junior highs to middle schools, anything might happen. In Monongalia County, it set off a far-reaching series of positive events.
It was back in the late 1990s when the Monongalia County Board of Education made the switch, part of the national movement to position sixth and ninth graders with their older peers. The shift created a challenge: Lots more student athletes would be practicing and competing on the same number of high school courts and fields.
Mark Nesselroad had a daughter playing softball and a son playing baseball in high school, and he knew the ball fields would be over capacity. But as a Morgantown developer—working at that time on Glenmark Centre, now Pierpont Centre—he could imagine realistic solutions.
“We needed to create sports fields so that all the freshmen, the junior varsities, and the high school teams would have a place to play,” he recalls thinking. As he tells it, he assembled colleagues in 1999: friend and FCX Systems owner Craig Walker, Bruce Sparks of Anker Energy, Board of Education President Michael Yura, and lawyer Sam Stone. “The idea was, we’ll form the Monongalia County Schools Foundation (MCSF) to help the Monongalia County Board of Education and Monongalia County schools transition from junior highs to middle schools as it would relate to athletic fields.”
Walker tells it a little differently. “He didn’t ask,” he laughs. “He called one day and said, ‘If you’re out, stop by the office. I need you to sign something.’ ” Nesselroad was making Walker treasurer of the new foundation, and this was the first Walker had heard of it. “I was happy to do it, quite honestly.”
It was a targeted group. With Walker as treasurer, Yura brought the school system perspective. Anker was winding down its strip mining operation west of town, and Sparks freed up 30 acres at its edge. Stone did the lawyering.
Between them and their connections, they got supplies, services, and labor donated—which included Nesselroad, Walker, and their wives all laying turf. “We had people painting dugouts and doing all sorts of things,” Walker says. “We came up Saturdays, Sundays, and evenings. If we needed a set of hands, people said, ‘We’ll help.’ ”
The new Anker Fields baseball and softball complex on Chaplin Hill Road hosted its first home game in the spring of 2000.
Fun and done, right? Well, not exactly. “I knew Mark,” Walker says. “His head was churning even back then with a vision for the whole area.” Over the past 25 years, that vision has expanded from 30 acres to over 400 and inspired the contributions of hundreds of people and organizations.
It can be hard to get your head around Mylan Park. For one thing, it’s huge—five times the size of the West Virginia Botanic Garden, with no good vantage point for seeing all of it at once. Its mix of educational, recreational, cultural, and social service facilities is so varied that any one of us only experiences a slice of it. And maps are soon out of date, because there’s always something new.
Mylan Park is that way because it doesn’t have a single, narrow motivating force. From pretty early on, the Foundation’s purpose was broadly to use its expanse west of town to fill gaps in local amenities. Project by project, willing partners have come together to fill them. The resulting assemblage hosts fitness facilities, fundraisers, and fairs and festivals. It’s home to high school, college, regional, and national sporting events.
This is the brief story of Mylan Park, 25 years in.
Early enthusiasm
Looking back, it’s surprising how fast the place grew.
A 2002 master plan laid out the big vision for what had already become 300 acres, including plans for an equestrian park, a natatorium, and much more. In June of that year, Morgantown philanthropist Milan Puskar pledged $1 million. The complex was renamed Mylan Park and, eventually, the MCSF became the Mylan Park Foundation.
Mylan Park earned an early distinction: Miracle Field, opened in 2003, was at the time one of only three baseball fields in the country designed specifically for use by the disabled. It featured a rubberized MONDO surface specially formulated for wheelchairs and walking devices, and it hosted baseball and soccer programs for children and adults with disabilities. The involvement of SteppingStones, which managed the programs, set an all-inclusive tone for Mylan Park, Nesselroad says.
The Board of Education’s bus garage relocated to Mylan Park, and its Alternative Learning Center for at-risk teens—the Excel Center—opened there. Big Brothers Big Sisters moved in. Horseshoes clanged at 12 pitching courts, with more courts to come. Multipurpose outdoor fields were under construction, along with Mylan Park Elementary School, a replacement for the century-old Cass Elementary.
In 2005, board member Cliff Sutherland, owner of Triple S Harley-Davidson, organized the inaugural MountainFest motorcycle rally to benefit Mylan Park. It was a move that drew high-level support: Eager to demonstrate the state’s biker-friendliness, Governor Joe Manchin, himself the proud owner of a Harley, led the downtown Parade of Bikes as parade marshal. Estimates of rally attendance ranged up to 30,000.
Mylan Park became a go-to festival venue. In 2007, RibFest was followed by the third annual MountainFest—40,000 bikers expected—and, later, Oktoberfest and the Morgantown Balloon Festival.
2007 was a turning point. The organization formally took the name Mylan Park Foundation, and it explicitly expanded its mission beyond the schools and children to the general improvement of quality of life.
Growing into the vision
If you’ve lived in Morgantown for any length of time, you’ve been to the Hazel and J.W. Ruby Community Center for a trade show, flea market, expo, fundraiser, or holiday arts fair.
Twenty years ago, there was no venue of its size—a noticeable lack in a growing university city at the intersection of north–south and east–west interstates. The board approached the Hazel Ruby McQuain Charitable Trust. “We said, ‘We want to build an event center with meeting space and basketball courts—a multipurpose 100,000 square feet that the entire community can use,’ ” Nesselroad recounts. “They gave us $2.4 million, if I remember right, to build it.”
The Ruby Community Center opened in 2008. The largest event center between Charleston and Pittsburgh, it could flexibly accommodate a wide variety of local, regional, and touring events, and it met a dire need. “Immediately, that facility gained a ton of traction,” Nesselroad says. “It was used for dog shows, trade shows, basketball and volleyball games, all kinds of things.” MountainFest, which had previously occupied multiple venues, could now be hosted entirely at Mylan Park. And the Monongalia County Fair, after a five-year hiatus for lack of a suitably large indoor–outdoor venue, made Mylan Park its new home in 2010.
Around this time, as Nesselroad remembers, then–WVU President James Clements was looking for a place to host university club sports. A Mylan Park–WVU agreement resulted in the construction of several new sports fields. University clubs would use the fields and event center during the school year, and the facilities would be available for community use during the summer. “It all worked together,” Nesselroad says—an expression of the multi-partner, multi-use model that makes Mylan Park tick.
Along the way, some of the big ideas have come and gone. Remember those horseshoe courts? “We had a vibrant group of horseshoe pitchers,” Nesselroad says. Irving Rider, president of the Mylan Park Horseshoe Pitching Club, touted the courts as the best east of the Mississippi, and leagues were forming in 2008. But participation dwindled, and the courts fell into disuse.
A larger project that came and went was the Horse and Event Center. A 2004 groundbreaking attended by Congressman Alan Mollohan, who had earmarked about $500,000, generated enthusiasm. Yet, equestrian events never got off the ground.
But other hoped-for facilities have found supporters, taken shape, and thrived. The natatorium in the 2002 master plan, for example, was meant to address Morgantown’s lack of an indoor public pool. When WVU entered the Big 12 in 2012, the university’s need for conference-worthy swim and track facilities aligned with that, and the Aquatic Center and Track Complex opened on the site of the former equestrian center in 2019. It now hosts Big 12 competitions and USA Diving national championships, along with lots of community fitness and recreation. Starting in 2025, the track will host the Mountain East Conference Track and Field Championships through 2029.
More recently, an extensive sports complex addition to the Ruby Community Center created capacity for additional basketball, volleyball, or pickleball courts, or simply larger events. Outdoor pickleball courts have been added, too.
More coming soon
Mylan Park starts its second quarter-century with a bang: Three grand new facilities are scheduled to open in 2025.
Given that the complex lies directly off of an interstate, offers an array of recreation and entertainment, and hosts a million visitors each year, “it’s a real opportunity for a KOA campground,” Nesselroad says. First announced in 2022, the planned campground will hold more than 160 RV, cabin, and tent sites.
Also in the works is an ice arena. It will be the city’s second, adding to the scheduled-morning-til-night Morgantown Ice Arena. While Mylan Park’s facility will give priority to WVU club hockey and the Morgantown Hockey Association, both will serve the public.
Finally, design is underway on the Mylan Park Bike Yard. To be located in the upper park near the Aquatic Center, it includes a USA BMX–sanctioned track, a competition-level pump track, progressive bike jump/flow lines, and a mountain bike skills trail loop. Consistent with Mylan Park’s commitment to accessibility, it is expected to be the first fully accessible BMX park in the U.S.
Investment and return
Over a very active quarter century, the Mylan Park we enjoy today has come about without the ongoing government funding that recreational complexes in other communities get. It’s been accomplished primarily through hard-won private and nonprofit grants and donations and occasional one-time government allocations, all totaling nearly $150 million so far. Because it’s mostly private money that doesn’t come with restrictions, the spending hasn’t always played out in full public view—which has sometimes provoked criticism. Where’s all the money coming from? Who’s getting the contracts to do the work?
Nesselroad concedes that the Foundation hasn’t always done a good job of telling
its story.
That story is one of a savvy cobbling together of funding partners, contractors who donate part of their services, and property management and lease agreements, each crafted to the specific conditions of a facility and its users. It’s a story of a very large and active board of community leaders—sometimes 30-plus members at a time—getting things done.
What their work has brought us is not only a place where we can all learn, play, and celebrate, but a real economic engine for Morgantown. There are no hard numbers since COVID-19, but Susan Riddle has some indications. She’s been a Mylan Park board member since 2016 and, as president and CEO of the Visit Mountaineer Country Convention and Visitors Bureau, her work is to attract outside events to Morgantown—that is, bring in new people and dollars.
She believes 1 million may be a low estimate for annual visits. “We have more than 60 large-scale events in the course of a year, and that’s just at the event center,” says Riddle. Pile onto that year-round athletics practices and competitions for teams at all levels, USA Diving championships, fairs and festivals, and dozens of smaller events through the year, and it quickly adds up.
For economic impact, Riddle works her way backward from the state’s regional estimate. “Visitor spending in Mountaineer Country, a nine-county region, is close to $800 million a year,” she says. “I would guess comfortably that Mylan Park is $50 to $75 million of that”—a handsome return on $150 million invested.
Gratitude
As Mylan Park and its longtime board members mature, the management model is shifting, Nesselroad says, to place more of the operations on paid staff and move the board into a less active oversight role. The leadership aims to raise enough money that ultimately, between operating revenue and endowment income, the complex can thrive and grow into the future.
At its 25th anniversary celebration on October 22, 2024, the Mylan Park Foundation honored its longtime champion, now Senator Joe Manchin. The Mylan Park recreational complex has had a profound impact on youth across our state and beyond, Manchin said. “The Mylan Park Foundation will continue to provide endless opportunities in the decades ahead.”
Asked which achievement of the past 25 years is particularly meaningful to him, Walker reaches back to a memory from 2003. “When Miracle Field had its first baseball game, it was hard not to get teary-eyed. To see the children’s excitement—that was their field. To me, that was probably the most impactful.”
Nesselroad looks back even further, to Anker Fields—one of which is named ISS Field. “Most people don’t know why it’s called that,” he says. “I supported that softball field and named it after my grandfather. His name was Israel, and he went by Iss.” Nesselroad’s daughter played in the first game at ISS Field, he says, and his son played in the second Anker Fields baseball game.
It has taken a village, a community, to make Mylan Park what it is, Nesselroad says, declining to name names out of the certainty that many would be left out. “This has been a labor of deep love by an awful lot of people. I pray—I believe—we have lived up to the expectations of all of the folks who have worked and made donations to the facility. We’re indebted.”
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