Meritus Park earns sensory certification, boosts accessibility for fans

Meritus Park added KultureCity sensory certification on June 23, giving the Hagerstown Flying Boxcars a formal accessibility credential and turning a ballpark visit into something more manageable for fans who struggle with crowd noise, bright lights or other sensory triggers. The club said staff and venue personnel completed the steps needed to create a safer, more inclusive environment for people with sensory needs and invisible disabilities, and KultureCity signage is now posted around the park to make the upgrade visible on game nights.

The change reaches past branding. Fans can check out a sensory bag at fan services from Jim James, and the bags include headphones, strobe glasses, fidget toys and a weighted lap pad. KultureCity describes its Sensory Inclusive certification as a program meant to make businesses more accessible and inclusive to people with sensory needs and invisible disabilities, and says the certification remains in place once earned. Its training resources are built for venues and organizations that want to better serve guests with those needs, which gives the Flying Boxcars a structured operation rather than a one-off gesture.

For Meritus Park, the certification fits a ballpark identity that has been built around more than baseball alone. The downtown Hagerstown facility was announced in 2021, broke ground in 2022 and opened on May 4, 2024. The City of Hagerstown describes it as a roughly 3,900-seat, $90-plus million venue owned and operated by the Hagerstown-Washington County Industrial Foundation, and league and club materials say it has a capacity of over 4,000, a Daktronics video board and a light-up Flying Boxcar display. That mix of size, technology and location has made accessibility a practical issue, not an afterthought.

The park’s first season showed how many people it now has to serve. The Atlantic League said Meritus Park drew nearly 175,000 people to downtown Hagerstown in 2024, a turnout that puts pressure on every part of the fan experience, from concessions to restroom access to how families handle sensory overload during a long game. The club also pointed to 2025 additions that included a grab-and-go concessions station, a Hagerstown Baseball Hall of Fame and a tribute to Willie Mays, all of which reinforce the park’s broader role in downtown Hagerstown.

The certification also arrives after Meritus Park was named the ALPB Ballpark of the Year for a second straight year in 2025. That recognition, paired with KultureCity’s sensory-inclusive designation, places the Flying Boxcars among the Atlantic League clubs trying to set a higher standard for what an independent ballpark can offer: baseball first, but with the details in place to make the night work for more of the people in the seats.