If you've followed the ballpark news out of downtown Zebulon this year, you already know the headline version. Five County Stadium is now Nomaco Park. The Carolina Mudcats, who played there for parts of four decades, are gone. In their place: the Zebulon Devil Dogz, a team built around college players recruited out of Australia.
That's the story that ran everywhere. It's accurate, and it also undersells what actually happened. The name is the least interesting part of this. What changed is the kind of building Nomaco Park is now, who runs it, and what it's being asked to do for the town. If you live here and haven't been out to the ballpark yet this year, here's the part the news recaps skipped.
What Actually Left When the Mudcats Did
Nomaco Park opened in 1991 and got an extensive renovation in 1999. For most of that run, it hosted affiliated professional baseball. The Carolina Mudcats played there in the Carolina League from 1991 to 2025, and the Milwaukee Brewers bought majority interest in the club in October 2017, which meant the players on the field were actual prospects moving through a major league farm system. For nearly 35 years, the stadium served as a landmark gathering place for the region.
That era ended quietly. Carolina's final home game was a 1-0 loss to the Delmarva Shorebirds on August 31, 2025, in front of 5,877 people. The team relocated to Wilson, North Carolina, and became the Wilson Warbirds, playing out of a new $69 million stadium the owners announced back in 2023.
What went with them was more than a mascot. Five County Stadium had one of the more distinctive ballpark designs in the sport, with a steeply raked grandstand that read more like a football stadium than a baseball park, sitting atop sheltered seating and a sit-down restaurant. Cattails, the sit-down restaurant, sat atop the upper deck on the first base line, and the whole concourse leaned into a running fishing joke, selling "fishing licenses" instead of tickets and serving food out of a stand called the Baitshop. That personality belonged to a specific tenant. It didn't automatically transfer.
The New Tenant Plays a Different Game, Literally
Here's the comparison most coverage skipped over:
| Through 2025 | 2026 and forward | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary tenant | Carolina Mudcats, Carolina League, Milwaukee Brewers affiliate | Zebulon Devil Dogz, Coastal Plain League, summer collegiate |
| Level of play | Professional minor league baseball | Amateur, college-age wood bat league |
| Stadium name | Five County Stadium | Nomaco Park |
| Day-to-day operator | Mudcats organization | Capitol Broadcasting Company, effective January 1, 2026 |
| Other regular tenants | None publicly listed | Wake Tech Community College athletics |
The line that matters most for anyone who grew up going to Mudcats games: this isn't a lateral move to a new pro team. The Devil Dogz are a collegiate summer baseball team organized in partnership with OzBall, an organization that helps Australian athletes find employment abroad. That's a wood-bat, college-eligibility league, not a professional developmental pipeline. If part of what you liked about Mudcats games was watching players who might someday reach the majors, that's not what's on the field anymore.
Wake County and Zebulon's town boards voted unanimously in September 2025 to approve Capitol Broadcasting Company as the new stadium operator, effective January 1, 2026. Capitol Broadcasting also owns the Coastal Plain League itself, so the team playing at Nomaco Park and the league it plays in now share an owner headquartered in Raleigh, not an independently run local franchise.
The Turnaround Was Fast, and It Showed
Nomaco Park was assessed as needing up to $1 million in renovations, and by March 2026 the team said it would start with the bathrooms, concession stands, and turf before opening day. Not a full renovation. A prioritized punch list, done on a deadline. By April, all Mudcats-themed branding had been stripped from the stadium and from the water tower next to it.
The public-facing turnaround happened in a single week. A ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 21, officiated by Zebulon Mayor Jessica Daniels Harrison and Wake County Board of Commissioners Chair Don Mial, preceded the team's first game on May 22. Opening night featured all-you-can-eat concessions, including hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, and a "mystery" Australian dish as a promotion. The opening weekend closed each night with postgame fireworks.
The Name Is Also a Local In-Joke
The naming process itself tells you something about who this team is trying to be. More than 900 suggestions came in for the team name, a panel narrowed it to five finalists, and Devil Dogz won with roughly 90 percent of the public vote at a Zebulon Town Hall meeting on February 24, 2026.
The name works on two levels. It references the Tasmanian devil, a nod to the team's Australian roster, and it doubles as a callback to Devil-Dog Dungarees, a jeans manufacturer that was based in Zebulon. It's a name built for a town that used to make things, wearing a mascot built for a country most of the roster came from.
Even the "all-Australian" premise didn't hold exactly as advertised. The final opening-night roster included players from New Zealand and the United States in addition to Australia, a detail that matters if you were expecting the marketing pitch to match the actual lineup card.
Why the Building's New Job Matters More Than the Team
This is the part that got buried under the mascot coverage. Nomaco itself isn't an outside sponsor buying a logo. Nomaco is a Zebulon-based foam-engineering firm, and Capitol Broadcasting's own framing of the deal leaned on that. Nomaco has been part of the Zebulon community for decades, and their leadership team's commitment to the region was cited as the reason the partnership made sense.
More significant than the naming rights: beginning in 2026, the stadium's listed primary tenants are the Zebulon Devil Dogz and Wake Technical Community College athletics, covering baseball, softball, and men's and women's soccer. That's a shift from one professional franchise renting the building all summer to a shared civic facility hosting a summer collegiate team, a community college's four sports programs, and whatever else gets booked. Add in a seating capacity of 6,500 with room for another 1,500 to 2,000 standing, and you've got a lot of civic square footage that used to answer to one team's schedule and now answers to several.
That's the actual headline. Nomaco Park didn't trade one team for another. It went from a single-tenant professional ballpark to shared community infrastructure, and the Devil Dogz are the most visible part of that, not the whole story.
How Residents Are Actually Using It This Year
A few specifics for anyone deciding whether to go:
- On Sunday home games, kids 12 and under get to run the bases after the final out, a small tradition but the kind that tells you who the ballpark is trying to serve now.
- The Zebulon Farm Fresh Market runs every Saturday from early May through mid-October at the Zebulon Community Center, a short walk from the ballpark and an easy pairing if you're already downtown.
- The Community Center also hosts a free Family Movie Night once a month, with popcorn and water included.
- For a sit-down meal before or after, Southland Steakhouse serves lunch and dinner with a menu that runs beyond steaks into shrimp, oysters, and salmon.
None of this requires you to have followed baseball closely to appreciate what's different. The town's ballpark spent 35 years as a single-purpose building with one tenant's name on the wall. Right now it's something more like a shared civic asset that happens to have a scoreboard, and that's a bigger change than any mascot redesign.
If you're weighing what's actually shifting in Zebulon this year, from new civic uses at the ballpark to what's happening on the streets around it, that kind of pattern is exactly what I track for clients thinking about this part of Wake County. Chad Ross is a call or text away if you want to talk through what any of it means for you.
