For twenty years the shorthand for Old Settlers Park was tournament weekends. Twenty baseball diamonds, five softball fields, a rugby pitch or a lacrosse bracket depending on the Saturday, and the parking lots at Palm Valley full of out-of-town minivans by 7 a.m. Residents used the trails at dusk and stayed away from the fields.
August 2026 is the first summer that setup no longer describes the park. The city rebuilt the middle of it around a stage, a playground, and a set of courts, and the calendar the Parks and Recreation Department is running now assumes you are coming for the evening, not the bracket.
The $147 million rebuild is finally showing up above ground
The Lakeview Stage and Pavilion opened on a Saturday night last November with a ribbon-cutting, a set by Allen Stone, and a fireworks show over the lake. The Lakeview Stage and Pavilion are part of a broader $147 million, voter-approved bond program aimed at modernizing Old Settlers Park. The new pavilion is nearly three times the size of the previous structure, which is the sort of number that only means something once you have stood at the old one during a July concert and realized there was nowhere for anyone to sit.
That November event was the first amenity to come out of the 2023 general obligation bond, and the reason to pay attention to it wasn't the fireworks. It was that the city built a permanent stage before it built anything else. Every project that has come after — the courts, the playground, the concert series — reads as evidence that Round Rock is trying to convert the park from a sports venue into a public living room.
April 25 was the tell
The grand opening the city held on April 25 stacked four things into one evening, and the schedule itself is worth reading like an argument:
- 6:00 p.m. — ribbon-cutting for the new Tennis and Pickleball Complex at the Adult Sports Complex, 3443 Aten Loop
- 6:00 p.m. — DJ Hella Yella and Faith Lee at the Lakeview Stage
- 6:45 p.m. — a thirty-minute "Premier Play Experience" for roughly 25 kids randomly drawn as Playground Pros
- 7:30 p.m. — Joanne Land Playground ribbon-cutting
- 8:30 p.m. — Live at Lakeview series kickoff with Lucas John
The $1.8 million project is funded through a 2023 voter-approved bond. WeBuildFun, which installed the original Joanne Land Playground in 2016, is installing the new version. Former city of Round Rock city secretary Joanne Land is the namesake of the playground. She served in the position from 1970-2002, during which the city's population grew from less than 3,000 people to more than 60,000. Four ribbon-cuttings in one night is not how a city rolls out a sports complex. It is how a city launches a season.
What August looks like from inside the park
The current calendar has a few overlapping series that a resident can chain together without moving the car. The Trailside Market runs along the Memorial Park Trail as an outdoor market with farmers, artisans, and local vendors, and Friday Fun Nights at Lakeview are back on the parks calendar as free family programming. Friday Fun Nights ARE BACK! Bring the family and enjoy free entertainment and activities, while enjoying the beautiful scenery of Old Settlers Park!
A representative August week inside the park now reads something like this:
| Night | What's happening | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday | Round Rock Express home game, first pitch 6:45 | Dell Diamond |
| Wednesday | Pickleball open play | Tennis and Pickleball Complex, Aten Loop |
| Thursday | Trailside Market vendors | Memorial Park Trail |
| Friday | Friday Fun Nights, Express home game | Lakeview lawn, Dell Diamond |
| Saturday | Live at Lakeview programming, Express home game | Lakeview Stage, Dell Diamond |
| Sunday | Sunday afternoon Express game, playground | Dell Diamond, Joanne Land |
The Express homestand pattern anchors the rest. Find tickets from 13 dollars to Albuquerque Isotopes at Round Rock Express on Tue, Aug 25, 6:45pm at Dell Diamond in Round Rock, TX, and the schedule this month runs a Sugar Land Space Cowboys series August 11 through 16 followed by Albuquerque coming back for six games August 25 through 30, with Sunday afternoon first pitches at 1:05. If you have not looked at Triple-A ticket prices in a while, that thirteen-dollar Tuesday number is worth sitting with — a family of four can get inside Dell Diamond for less than a movie.
Where the kids go before dark
The Joanne Land Playground is the piece most likely to reshape the average Round Rock parent's Saturday, because it is a real playground and not a symbolic one. It sits next to the Lakeview Pavilion, which means a parent can watch the toddler on the equipment while a bigger kid runs the lawn during soundcheck. Before this year, families made a choice between the sports side of the park and the trail side. The rebuild collapses that choice into one field of view.
A mile and a half south on A.W. Grimes, Play for All Park is running its own expansion in parallel. Work on the sustainability-themed play pod is expected to begin this month, with an anticipated spring/summer 2026 completion. The pod is funded through a mix of the 2023 city bond and a $250,000 National Neighborhood Promise grant from the Republic Services Charitable Foundation, and it adds a themed area on top of a park that draws about 1,000 visitors per day on its own. If your kids have already memorized the original playscape, the sustainability pod is the summer's new room.
Two things worth knowing about Play for All specifically. It is fully gated and fenced, which is why parents of runners feel comfortable there in a way they don't at open playgrounds. And it sits at the trailhead of the Brushy Creek Regional Trail, so a Saturday can start with a playground hour and end with a slow stroller lap north toward Lake Creek without touching the car.
The Express is still the anchor, and it is finally not the only reason to drive over
Dell Diamond is the piece that makes the whole park make sense economically. It brought people east of I-35 for two decades before anyone was going to sit on a lawn to hear Lucas John. Ticket floors this month are running about thirteen to fourteen dollars for Tuesday and Wednesday games against the Isotopes and Space Cowboys, with Friday and Saturday games pricing in the low twenties. The Bark in the Park nights, Chupacabras de Round Rock alternate identity games, and the Express Kids Club promotions keep the ballpark tilted toward families rather than corporate suites.
What the Lakeview build changes is the answer to "what do we do if there's no home game." Before this year, the honest answer for a lot of Round Rock families was Kalahari, Main Street, or Austin. Now there is a stage two hundred yards from the ballpark parking lots with its own schedule.
What is queued behind all of this
A project filing at the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation in June flagged the next domino. In a project filing from the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, records show a Slick City Action Park is planned for a 44,602-square-foot space and will cost about $1 million to build. Per the filing, the facility will include indoor slides and a cafe. The site is near Red Bud Lane on the east side, roughly ten minutes from Old Settlers, and the format — dry indoor slides, an air court, a cafe — reads as the rainy-day and August-afternoon complement to what the park is doing outdoors.
Slick City is a Texas-based chain with locations in Arlington, Frisco, Plano, and now The Woodlands. The company was founded in 2022 by Bron Launsby, CEO of Slick City, and Gary Schmit, Founder and CEO of slide manufacturer Slick Slide, and it fits into the same conversation as the Lakeview build for the same reason: someone is betting that Round Rock families want indoor and outdoor gathering rooms that don't require a drive to South Austin.
The point
If you have been out of Old Settlers Park for a year, walk in the Palm Valley entrance one evening this month and notice what has changed. The Lakeview Pavilion is where the acoustic tell is — sound carries across the lake now in a way the old shell never allowed. The playground is a real destination, not an afterthought behind the concession stand. The tennis and pickleball complex at Aten Loop is drawing a weeknight crowd that used to drive to Brushy Creek. And on Express home nights, the parking lot fills the way it always has, only now the people spilling out at nine aren't all going home. Some of them are walking two hundred yards to catch the last set at the stage.
August 2026 is the first summer the park works as one continuous evening rather than a collection of tournaments. That's a shift residents will feel long before the market catches up to it.
If you are thinking about how any of this changes the case for staying in your Round Rock home versus moving up within the city, the local team at JBGoodwin REALTORS® is happy to talk it through. Contact Us.
