BY STEFANIE JACKSON BOWMANN, Eastern Shore Post —
The new director of Accomack County Parks and Recreation has a vision that includes a variety of recreation and leisure options for all ages, abilities, and interests.
Ethan Watkins has lived on the Eastern Shore for about 15 years and grew up in the small town of Doylestown, Ohio, where “everybody knew everybody” and there were “people helping people all the time,” he said.
Watkins has spent most of his life helping people through counseling and therapy, parks and recreation, or a combination of both.
His passion for helping others was inspired by his father, a special education teacher and college professor, and his mother, a high school English teacher.
Through a professor friend of his father, Watkins started his career at age 12 at the University of Akron as a junior peer mentor at a summer day camp for children with disabilities, including mental, physical, emotional, and behavioral disabilities.
He majored in psychology at the University of Cincinnati and held several positions in the city of Cincinnati’s recreation department, including an experience in therapeutic recreation, providing activities such as indoor rock climbing for people with disabilities.
He and his wife, Amy Watkins, were living in Northern Virginia about 15 years ago when they visited the Eastern Shore to see one of her friends from college.
During their stay, Ethan Watkins met the founder of Therapeutic Interventions, the community mental health provider that developed a years-long partnership with both Accomack and Northampton county public schools.
Watkins and his family moved to the Shore, and he was a counselor for Therapeutic Interventions for nearly a decade.
Most recently, Watkins was the regional program director for the Eastern Shore’s two main YMCA locations in Onley and Cape Charles.
He brings his experience and dedication in serving others to his new role as director of Accomack County Parks and Recreation.
Watkins manages Accomack County’s two public parks, the 25-acre Arcadia Park and the 33-acre Sawmill Park, and a 10-acre golf driving range behind Pungoteague Elementary School.
Sawmill Park, in Accomac, is the site of the vision Watkins has for the future of recreation and leisure in Accomack County.
“One of my biggest goals is to get people to look at parks and recreation a little different … as a place for everybody,” Watkins said.
But he’s not going it alone. Watkins is partnering with outside groups, like the Eastern Shore Area Agency on Aging/Community Action Agency, with whom he is collaborating to develop programs for senior citizens.
He also has created the group Friends of Sawmill Park, whose members will volunteer in the park and out in the community, such as at food banks, nursing homes, and schools.
Accomack County Parks and Recreation already offers several sports programs, and Sawmill Park features a baseball and softball field, a soccer field, a 9-hole disc golf course, a playground, and a pavilion — but Watkins has much more in mind.
He is formulating a seven-year plan for Sawmill Park to have “zero unused space,” Watkins said.
The pavilion, which is built over the location of the former sawmill for which the park was named, will be the “hub” of the park, with areas for a variety of sports, games, and other activities extending from the park’s central feature, he said.
Watkins is planning a dog park in the front of the park, complete with agility equipment for playful pooches. He said there has been “a lot of community interest” in a dog park, which is one of three ideas for Sawmill Park that are “doable in the near future.”
The other two are a college regulation-size soccer field in the rear of the park and resurfacing the concrete floor of the pavilion, which extends out on both sides of the structure, where there will be courts for pickleball and shuffleboard.
But that’s only the beginning. Watkins wants to add inclusive playground equipment for children with disabilities, bocce courts, volleyball courts, and flag football fields — about three to five of those could fit inside the future soccer field, he said.
Where the soccer field is temporarily located — on the west side of Sawmill Park, in front of the baseball field — Watkins envisions an amphitheater with local musicians and bands playing in a summer concert series.
Watkins would like to see Sawmill Park host a variety of offerings, from music festivals to arts and crafts fairs and perhaps even kite-flying — a “multigenerational” and “nostalgic” pastime, he said.
“When people think of parks and rec, they think of sports,” but “leisure activities are just as important,” he said. “In a fast-paced world, it’s hard to slow down.”
