The Best Seats
In The House

Any time we get called back to a campus we already know well (and is right in our backyard), it feels like coming home. That's always the case at the University of Ottawa, where we were brought in early on the revitalization of Matt Anthony Field project and tasked with replacing aging sideline seating and adding a purpose-built platform.

Founded in 1848 as the College of Bytown, the University of Ottawa is the world’s largest English-French bilingual university. Sitting in the heart of Canada’s capital, it has grown from a modest wooden college into one of the country’s most respected research and educational institutions. Its athletic teams wear garnet and grey as the Ottawa Gee-Gees, a name that grew out of those school colours more than a century ago.

One of our most recent projects brought us back to beautiful Brampton, Ontario. Working in a city that seems to just keep on growing, this job brought us to Sesquicentennial Park in Brampton North where key stakeholders at the city were looking to shore-up some new safety padding for the park’s baseball diamonds.

Once known as Countryside Park, Sesquicentennial has become one of the city’s busiest outdoor destinations. It is a large, multi-diamond complex featuring eight slo-pitch fields (most of them lit), a field house, and change rooms. In recent years the city has also built out an Activity Hub on the site which includes an accessible playground, splash pad, fitness equipment, shade shelters, picnic areas, and walking connections that pull in families who may never pick up a bat. Tournaments, league nights, kids in the water, seniors on the paths, and vehicles in the lots all share the same piece of ground, and that is exactly the kind of park where a well-hit softball stops being “just part of the game.”

When it comes to getting more seats along the sideline, field or track, facility managers, athletic directors, principals, and municipal recreation departments usually start the same way: they have a budget and possible site constraints, and they do not want to buy the wrong system.

The main outdoor bleacher seating options for sports fields are non-elevated aluminum bleachers, elevated bleachers, portable or transportable (towable) bleachers, angle-frame multi-tier bleachers, and I-beam grandstand stadium bleachers. The right choice depends on capacity, how often the seating needs to move, whether the site can take a foundation, accessibility requirements, and which building code applies in your province or state.

This guide was designed to walk you through each option so you can compare durability, accessibility, code compliance, and site fit before you write a spec or request a quote.

New arenas and major renovations across Canada keep calling on Sport Systems for custom arena bleachers, especially in those instances when barrier-free seating, elevated sightlines, and a clean closed-deck system are non-negotiable. The Ron Ebbesen Twin Arena in Airdrie, Alberta is a recent example where all of those factors came into play.

Sitting just north of Calgary in one of Alberta’s fastest-growing communities, the twin-pad facility has been a cornerstone of local hockey, ringette, and skating since it opened back in 1991. It carries the name of Ron Ebbesen, a builder who spent years pushing for more ice, stronger minor hockey, and a girls’ program so that Airdrie talent would have a proper home. After a mid-life renovation last year, that home now includes seating worthy of the next generation of fans.

Nestled along the Mattagami River in the heart of Northeastern Ontario’s mining country lies the City with the Heart of Gold, as it is often called. With deep roots in Canadian history, the City of Timmins continues to invest in facilities that bring people together, including a recent commitment included a fresh set of accessible bleachers for one of its soccer fields.

We’ve had a long history of doing business with the City of Timmins and on the 2026 edition of improvements, key stakeholders from the city had their sights set on our most popular 5-row model from our Platinum lineup. With inclusion being a requirement, these barrier-free units are designed so every spectator can access the seating comfortably and safely.

We field a lot of questions around here but when the phone rings and our dealer Blue Imp is on the other end, we know the project will be special — we just didn’t know how truly special this one would be.

Looking to set up some spectator seating at the Saamis Tepee, also known as the world' s largest tepee, our dealer turned to the experts at Canada’s Bleacher Source to help get the job done.

Any time schools and other athletic facilities are looking to get a little bit more out of their gym space, they often turn to our team for one of our state-of-the-art gym divider curtain solutions. In most of the cases, the goal is almost always the same as operators are looking for dynamic ways to make a single gym as multipurpose as possible, both during school hours and after.

Code-aware planning for wall padding, basketball goal padding, and impact protection in school gymnasiums (U.S. & Canada)

When it comes to high energy spaces, not much can compare to the gymnasiums located inside our schools across the country. These are popular spaces where sports like basketball, volleyball, PE classes and even community events collide, often literally. Here in 2026, gymnasium padding is no longer an optional upgrade, it has now become a core safety requirement driven by athlete performance levels, liability exposure, insurance expectations, and governing body standards both here in Canada and in the United States.

This guide delivers a clear, practical roadmap for school athletic directors, coaches, PE teachers, principals and facility managers, “covering” exactly where padding is needed on basketball courts and multi-sport gyms, how much protection is required, the key standards that matter (NFHS, OPHEA, FIBA, ASTM), and how to select and install safe, durable gymnasium padding that supports code-aware facility planning.

For the last four years, we’ve officially opened the floodgates for Canada’s ugliest bleachers. After rolling out our inaugural Ugly Bleacher Contest back in 2023, we’ve received hundreds of photos from coast-to-coast, showing off the splintered wood, sagging seats, and paint that’s more of a memory than anything else, of Canada’s Ugliest seating structures. Each year since then, we’ve crowned a winner and delivered a fresh set of bleachers directly to their community.

But here’s the secret the rest of the country is starting to figure out:

You don’t have to win to win!

Of all of the cornerstones of neighborhood life, there are not many that carry as much importance than that of the local community centre. These locations often serve as a backbone to their communities and offer drop-in basketball opportunities, open gym times, youth programming, family activities, and just about everything in between. Over the past 45 years, we’ve spent plenty of time in these types of communities and the centres that anchor them and always enjoy the opportunity to give back.