Small Alabama City Raises Its Grant Request to $1 Million to Build New Tennis and Pickleball Courts
- Moulton, Alabama city leaders voted to raise a federal grant request from $750,000 to $1 million, the maximum allowed, to help build four pickleball courts, two tennis courts and a splash pad at H.A. Alexander Park.
- The city’s original 2024 grant application ran into engineering and budget problems that state reviewers flagged only after Mayor Ryan Jolly’s administration took office, forcing a redo of the numbers before the increase could be requested.
- If the extra funding comes through, Moulton still has to cover a $500,000 match from its alcohol tax account and capital improvement fund, on top of a $77,500 invoice already approved for engineering and design.
A town of fewer than 3,400 people is chasing a court upgrade most players assume only big cities can pull off
At a regular meeting on September 8, the Moulton city council voted to ask the state for more money to finish a recreation project that has been stuck in paperwork dating back to 2024. The city’s federal grant request for new pickleball courts, tennis courts and a splash pad at H.A. Alexander Park is going up from $750,000 to $1 million, the ceiling for a single award under the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That two-year gap between the original submission and this month’s vote shows how much red tape a small city has to work through to land federal recreation dollars.
Mayor Ryan Jolly told the council the increase was not the plan when his administration took over an application that had already been sitting with state reviewers. “When we came in, we had an open LWCF grant application that was waiting for review by ADECA, and we got a substantial list of things that needed to be amended after their review,” Jolly said. “We had a video conference with ADECA, so we understood exactly what we needed and we realized that we had not done some of the early legwork when this was submitted in 2024.”
The engineering numbers that blew up the original application
ADECA is the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, the state agency that reviews Land and Water Conservation Fund applications before they move forward. Jolly said the agency’s feedback exposed a problem that had nothing to do with the courts themselves and everything to do with how the original request was put together.
“Engineering was the biggest issue we ran up against,” Jolly said. “So, we reached out to one of our engineering firms that we had approved through the RFQ process earlier. We had a conference meeting with them and NARCOG and we outlined a plan on getting the application to where it needed to be for final approval and in doing that, we were made aware that the budget numbers were significantly off.”
NARCOG is the North Central Alabama Regional Council of Governments, a public agency that helps small cities in the region put together grant applications for state and federal money. Once Moulton’s team and NARCOG worked through the design with the approved engineering firm, the true cost of building four pickleball courts, two tennis courts and a splash pad came in well above what the city had originally asked for.
Getting the state to say yes to more money
Finding out a grant request is short is one problem. Convincing a state agency to let a city ask for more money on an application already in review is another. Jolly said he went directly to the person overseeing the program rather than wait for the next review cycle.
“So, I went back and had a phone call with Division Chief from ADECA and asked her if she would be willing to approve a change to our application to request additional funds and she said they would be, but we needed to approve a resolution asking for the increase,” Jolly said.
The council did exactly that on September 8, formally approving a resolution asking ADECA to bump the request from $750,000 to $1 million. That figure is the maximum a single applicant can request through the Land and Water Conservation Fund, so Moulton is now asking for as much money as the program allows for this project.
What players in Lawrence County would actually get
The Land and Water Conservation Fund is a federal program that pays for public outdoor recreation projects, and it comes with a catch: cities have to match whatever they receive dollar for dollar. A $1 million award means Moulton needs to find $500,000 of its own money before a single court gets poured.
Jolly said that match would come from a combination of savings in the city’s alcohol tax account and its capital improvement fund, rather than a new tax or bond. The council also voted at the same meeting to approve a $77,500 invoice from Goodwyn Mills Cawood, the firm handling engineering and design work for the future tennis and pickleball courts, a sign the project is still moving even while the funding request works through the state.
For players in Lawrence County, the payoff would be four dedicated pickleball courts and two tennis courts at H.A. Alexander Park where there currently are none, plus a splash pad that would turn the park into more of a family destination rather than a single-sport facility. None of that gets built, though, until ADECA signs off on the higher request and Moulton lines up its half of the money.
Small towns are competing for the same grant dollars as everyone else
Moulton’s grant fight is a small-scale version of a fight playing out in city halls across the country right now. Tennis participation in the United States reached 27.3 million players in 2025, up 1.6 million from the year before and the sixth straight year of growth, according to the United States Tennis Association’s 2026 participation report. Pickleball has grown even faster over the same stretch, and both sports are pushing cities and counties to find room, and money, for more courts.
What makes Moulton’s situation different from a big-city court expansion is the math involved. A $500,000 local match is a rounding error in a metro parks budget. For a city this size, it means pulling from an alcohol tax account and a capital improvement fund that almost certainly have other demands on them. The city’s decision to go back to the state and ask for the maximum grant amount, rather than scale the project down to fit the original $750,000, shows local officials are prioritizing getting courts built over settling for less.
What happens next
The resolution approved on September 8 now goes back to ADECA, which will decide whether to approve Moulton’s request for the full $1 million. If the state signs off, Moulton will need to finalize its $500,000 match before construction on the pickleball courts, tennis courts and splash pad can begin at H.A. Alexander Park.
There’s no construction timeline yet, and there won’t be one until the grant question is settled. But the engineering and design work the council paid for on September 8 means Moulton will be ready to move as soon as the money is in place, rather than starting the planning process from scratch after waiting more than a year for its answer.
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