Who Designs Nebraska’s Parks and Playgrounds?

A good neighborhood park feels like it just happened. The grass slopes the right way, the water drains where it should, the playground sits in the shade, the trail loops back to the parking lot, and the courts are exactly where you’d want them. It feels natural.

Behind every park that works, there’s a firm that engineered it to work- somebody who figured out the grading and drainage, sized the site, laid out the circulation, and decided where every piece goes before a single shovel hit the dirt. Get that part wrong and you end up with a beautiful park that floods every spring and a playground nobody can reach.

At Endurance Courts, we build and resurface the courts that go inside these parks, which means we usually show up after the design and engineering firm has done its work. We’ve seen what good planning does for a project and what skipping it costs.

So we put together a guide to the Nebraska firms that design and engineer parks and playgrounds, and what each one is known for.

Why Does It Matter Who Designs the Park? Because the design firm makes the decisions you live with for the next twenty years.

If you’re a parks director, a developer, or a community trying to figure out who to call, start here.

Who Handles Nebraska’s Biggest Park Projects?

When a project is large, complex, or public, two firms with deep Nebraska roots tend to be in the room.

Olsson is one of the nation’s largest engineering and design firms, with an extensive presence in Nebraska. Their team pairs civil engineers with landscape architects and community planners, which is exactly the mix big park work demands. They handle everything from refreshing a streetscape to designing new recreational hubs and upgrading local parks. They’ve also worked at the scale of regional recreation. If your project has a lot of moving parts and needs real engineering behind it, they can carry the whole thing.

HDR is the other Omaha-based heavyweight. It’s a global architecture and engineering firm with deep civil and planning capabilities. Courts and playgrounds are a small slice of what they do compared to major infrastructure, but for large public projects that need serious engineering muscle, they’re a known quantity right here in the metro.

Which Firm Designs Parks With Courts Built In?

If your project includes tennis, pickleball, or multi-use courts, The Clark Enersen Partners in Lincoln is the firm with the clearest track record.

Founded in 1946 by an architect and a landscape architect, Clark & Enersen brings architecture, engineering, and landscape architecture under one roof- and athletic and recreational fields are part of what their landscape group does day to day.

Their work at Lincoln’s Woods Park is a good example: the master plan brought together multi-purpose play fields, a new sprayground, a playground, bike paths, and a full tennis complex with new exterior courts and an indoor center. They also designed the Jayne Snyder Trails Center, which doubles as a downtown trailhead and community space.

When a park is meant to do a little of everything for every age group, this is the kind of firm that knows how to fit the courts into the bigger picture instead of treating them as an afterthought.

Who Pulls Civil Engineering and Site Design Together for Developers?

Lamp Rynearson, based in Omaha, is the firm to know when a park is part of a larger development.

They combine civil engineering with landscape architecture and planning, and they spend a lot of time working alongside developers, local governments, and organizations on the front end of projects — housing studies, preliminary planning, and the design of streets, parks, and waterfronts. If you’re a developer adding amenity space to a residential community, or a city trying to make a new neighborhood and its park hang together, Lamp Rynearson lives in that intersection of engineering and design.

Who Works With Smaller Nebraska Communities?

Not every project is a metro mega-park, and JEO Consulting Group out of Lincoln is one of the firms that shows up for the rest of the state.

JEO is a civil engineering and planning firm with a strong municipal practice, including parks and recreation work for smaller Nebraska communities. These are exactly the towns chasing grants and stretching every dollar, where a tennis-to-pickleball conversion or a thoughtfully phased park plan makes a real difference. If you’re a small community without a big in-house staff, this is a firm built to work with you.

What About Trails and Natural Spaces?

Worth a mention even though they’re a pure landscape architecture firm rather than an engineering shop: Big Muddy Workshop in Omaha.

Founded in 1990, Big Muddy specializes in the naturalistic side of the work — parks, trails, green infrastructure, prairie and wetland restoration, and nature centers. They were the lead designer on the urban stretch of the Omaha Riverfront Trail and have had a hand in projects like the fishing pond at Gretna Crossing Park. If your vision leans toward trails, restoration, and outdoor experiences more than hardscape and courts, they’re the specialists.

Where Do the Courts Fit In?

On the plan, a court is one line item. In the park, it’s one of the few things people use almost every single day — the tennis crowd at 7 a.m., the kids shooting hoops after school, the pickleball league on weekends.

That’s the part we care about at Endurance Courts.

The firms above design the park; we build and resurface the courts that make it get used. The best results happen when the court is planned right from the start and then built and maintained by people who do courts and only courts.

If you’re designing a park or planning one for your community, let’s talk about the court before it’s an afterthought. And if you’re one of the firms above, we’d love to be the court partner on your next project. Reach us at (402) 590-5600 or email build@endurancecourts.com.