The Best Seats
In The House

Last week Ontario’s Minister of Sport walked our warehouse floor. Here’s what municipalities and rec operators should know about the $500 million CSRIF intake now open.

We were proud to host Ontario’s Minister of Sport, Brian Saunderson, and Aaron Prance from his office in our facility last week. As part of their tour, they were looking at the same things facility operators and managers are often in search of, including accessible bleacher systems, gymnasium equipment, wall padding solutions and outdoor basketball systems built for the Canadian elements.

The official Ontario Sport recap of that Ottawa trip also included a visit to an Ottawa Rapid FC practice and a stop at the Alexander Community Centre. The purpose of these three visits aligned with the goal of the recently-improved Community Sport and Recreation Infrastructure Fund (CSRIF) who's stated purpose is to create more places to play, facilities that last longer, and invest in infrastructure that communities can host events in.

One of our most recent projects brought us just down the road from our Eastern Ontario office, to the heritage town of Perth.

Founded in 1816 as a military settlement after the War of 1812 and named for its Scottish counterpart, Perth is the kind of place that still feels like a small town should. Stone buildings line the town’s main streets, the Tay River winds through Stewart Park behind Town Hall, and on summer nights the ballpark is where a good chunk of the community actually is. It is also a town that takes recreation seriously, featuring ball diamonds, soccer pitches, courts, a splash pad, and the kind of weekend traffic that makes safety more than a nice-to-have.

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.