What it is
Kiwanis Park is the big park of south Tempe, 125 acres of lawn, old trees and ballfields between Mill Avenue and All-America Way just south of Baseline Road, arranged around a 13-acre lake. The lake is the center of it: a loop path around the shore, pedal boats from a dock on the east side in season, anglers on the banks for the trout the state stocks in winter and the bass and catfish that live there all year, and a resident population of ducks and geese that has been fed by three generations of Tempe toddlers.
The buildings on the north side are what make it more than a park. The Kiwanis Recreation Center holds an indoor wave pool with a slide, a gymnasium and a fitness room, and it is the only indoor wave pool in the East Valley, which in a city with four months of 105-degree afternoons is a real thing. Next to it the Kiwanis Tennis Center has fifteen lighted courts and a staffed pro shop. Around the rest of the park are the standard Tempe fittings at an unusual scale: several playgrounds, a splash pad the city calls The Cloud, a batting range, soccer fields and more group ramadas than anyone can count, which is why every birthday party in south Tempe seems to happen here.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Mostly, do not; Scottsdale has this park twice over. Chaparral Park and Eldorado Park are the same idea, a lake with a loop path and lawns and a pool, ten minutes from Old Town along the Greenbelt. Kiwanis earns the extra fifteen minutes for two things Scottsdale lacks: an indoor wave pool, which is the July answer our pools note does not otherwise have, and a fifteen-court tennis center you can book by the hour without a resort key. If you are already in Tempe, it is also the picnic ground, better shaded than anything on Town Lake.
The practical version
Twenty-four minutes from Old Town: Scottsdale Road south until it becomes Rural Road, west on Baseline, south into the park on Mill or All-America Way. Free parking in several lots. The wave pool and the courts have fees and schedules; check the city’s page before you drive, because the wave pool’s public sessions move with the season. Allow two hours for a swim, half a day if you add the lake.
When to go
October through April is the park’s season, when the lawns are green with winter rye, the trout are in the lake and a weekend afternoon is seventy-five degrees under the cottonwoods. Summer is for the wave pool: an indoor swim at 2 PM when the outdoor pools of Scottsdale are too hot to stand beside, with the slide and the waves on a schedule. The tennis center is lighted, so summer tennis means evenings. Saturday mornings year-round are the youth soccer and birthday-party crush; weekday afternoons are quiet enough to have the lake loop to yourself.
What to do
The wave pool runs sessions of an hour or two with the waves switched on in cycles; the slide is for children over a height line and the shallow end is for the rest. The tennis center takes reservations by the hour and has a wall for solo practice. The pedal boats are a half-hour rental on the lake in season. The lake loop is about a mile and flat. Fishing needs an Arizona license and gets good in the winter stocking weeks. The batting range behind the ballfields takes tokens. The Cloud splash pad is on in the warm months and free.
With kids
This is the park’s whole purpose. The wave pool is the East Valley’s best wet afternoon for a six-to-twelve-year-old, the splash pad covers the younger ones for nothing, the playgrounds are several and large, and the ducks will take whatever you have. Our Scottsdale with kids note has Kiwanis down as the rainy-day and hot-day swim when the resort pool has lost its charm.
The neighborhood
South Tempe along Baseline and Rural is the city’s residential half, suburban and quiet, with the retail you need at the corners. Changing Hands Bookstore is ten minutes southeast at McClintock and Guadalupe, and pairs with a park afternoon better than anything else nearby.
The story
Kiwanis Park was built in the 1970s as Tempe grew south of Baseline Road, on land that had been farms along the canal system, and it was named for the service club that pushed for it, as several Valley parks were. The lake came with the park: an artificial basin fed by the irrigation system, lined and stocked, which was the fashion in Valley park design in that decade and which Scottsdale was following at the same time with the Greenbelt lakes at Chaparral and Eldorado. The recreation center and its wave pool came later, when indoor aquatic centers were a brief Sun Belt fashion, and Tempe’s is the one in the East Valley that stuck.
The city has rebuilt pieces of the park steadily: new playgrounds, the Cloud splash pad, resurfaced courts with electronic scoring and video at the tennis center, and a management plan in the late 2010s that treated Kiwanis as the city’s flagship park, which it is. Arizona Game and Fish stocks the lake through its community fishing program, trout in the cold months and catfish in the warm ones, which is why there are anglers at the shore on a January morning.
The Scottsdale connection
The Greenbelt parks and Kiwanis are siblings: the same decade, the same lake-in-a-park idea, the same irrigation water. Where Scottsdale strung its lakes along a flood channel and left the pools outdoors, Tempe put one big lake in one big park and built a roof over the pool. For a Scottsdale visitor the comparison is practical: Chaparral for the walk, Kiwanis for the indoor swim and the tennis you can book without a membership.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south from Old Town through south Scottsdale and into Tempe, where it becomes Rural Road; continue to Baseline Road, turn west, and enter the park from Mill Avenue or All-America Way. About 24 minutes with no traffic. From the 101, the Baseline exit and three miles west is faster from North Scottsdale. The park is a car trip; the Valley Metro light rail does not come near it, and our getting around note has the rideshare math, which does not favor a park this far south for a short visit.