The Best Seats
In The House

If you are a facility manager, principal or gym teacher at a local school, it’s no secret to you that stage pads do a whole lot more than just protect athletes from hard edges in a busy gymnasium. They take a beating every day. With a constant barrage of students sitting and standing on them, not to mention the endless dragging of equipment across them, over time that constant use starts to show. Despite the near indestructible nature of our padding, the reality is most schools reach out for replacement or updated stage padding roughly every eight years for this very reason.

Back in 2025, our Florida dealer partners at Tadeos Engineering received a request to return to Dade Christian School for another project. This time around, the school was in need of a new set of telescopic bleachers for one of its gymnasiums, and Tadeos turned to our team, once again, for our Kodiak 2400 Series systems.

Dade Christian School, located in the Miami Lakes / Hialeah area, is a private Christian school that proudly serves students from 2-year-old kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. Founded in 1961 as a ministry of New Testament Baptist Church, the school has a long history of focusing on academic excellence within a faith-based environment. Its students consistently score above state and national averages on achievement tests, and the campus supports a range of athletic programs that make reliable, flexible gym seating especially valuable.

When university clients need to replace an aging gym divider curtain, they are quickly learning that the right company to call is Sport Systems. Our reputation for quality work and reliable solutions has earned us that trust, and in 2025 we received exactly that call from the good folks Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

After a few key stakeholders had heard of our solid track record as one of the best in the business, they reached out to find out for themselves. From the outset they made it clear they wanted to work with our team on this important upgrade to their gymnasium and were proud to partner with us to deliver a solution that would improve functionality and give the space a fresh, modern look.

Located in Belleville, our friends at Loyalist College are now with some recently installed indoor and outdoor bleachers designed and installed by our experienced team. With the ongoing expansion of this campus, it’s looking like the Loyalist Lancers are about to have one of the nicest athletic facilities in Ontario’s Seaway Valley.

Built neatly within the Ontario College Athletic Association, Loyalist is home to teams in both men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball, and cross country, women’s soccer, women’s rugby 7s, and maintains a busy intramural and campus recreation schedule. The new gymnasium was built to give those teams, and the rest of the campus, a proper home court, and we were fortunate enough to have been brought in on the action.

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.