Originally posted on whidbeynewstimes.com

Friday afternoon, a couple dozen elementary school children marched down Main Street in Coupeville to the edge of town, where a club house on Ebey’s prairie welcomed them to rooms brimming with technology and activities.

Before the light got too dusky, the kids in the Boys and Girls Club hurried outside to the large, new playground that has views of the Olympic Mountains, farmland, woods — and if you climb to the top — the waters of Admiralty Inlet. Not that the laughing, climbing and running children had time to admire the surroundings.

The playground was built with a generous donation from Coupeville resident Richard Thom, who funded the project in honor of his late wife, Linda. He explained they have two children and six grandchildren and always cared about child welfare. He saw that the need for the playground was obvious.

On Friday, he watched the children gleefully crawling all over the equipment.

“It’s really heartwarming to see,” he said.

The building itself, which opened a year ago, was constructed with nearly $2 million in appropriations from the state legislature, as well as sizable donations from the community.

Bill Tsoukalas, executive director of Snohomish and Island Counties’ Boys and Girls Clubs, said the next project for the Coupeville chapter is to build an adjacent gymnasium that could be used by both the children of the club and the adults in the community.

U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen already kickstarted the effort to raise the estimated $2 million for a 8,000-square-foot, freestanding gym. In March, he secured $500,000 for the project in the Fiscal Year 2024 spending package.

Gym space for adults is missing from the Central Whidbey community, Tsoukalas pointed out, and the new facility could fill the void, providing a space for basketball, volleyball, pickleball, badminton and possible other sports.