The Best Seats
In The House

Bleacher seating is one of the highest-risk elements in a school gym, outdoor field, or municipal sports venue. Crowds, weather, repeated opening and closing of telescopic systems, and deferred maintenance regularly create non-compliance with safety codes, fall hazards, and liability exposure.

Unfortunately, many facilities only discover problems after an incident, an insurance review, or a formal inspection. This guide explains why bleacher seating safety issues are so common, what makes ongoing compliance difficult, and how school and municipal facility managers can assess their systems, prioritize upgrades, and reduce risk.

If you work anywhere near the construction industry, you know that any new build site is a busy place. The same can be said in our neck of the woods when it comes to new construction of school or community gymnasiums. These environments are often made up of multiple trades that share the same space, schedules that shift, and where the order of work matters. As with most projects, getting any form of specialized equipment in at the right moment—before the floor goes down, while scissor lifts and other gear can still operate freely—can protect both the schedule and the budget. The new gymnasium build at the myFM Centre in Ma-te-Way Park in Renfrew, Ontario, is a clear example of how that coordination works in practice.

With the goal of providing local residents with caring and compassionate homes, the Supportive Therapeutic Enhanced Program Services (S.T.E.P.S.) operates a number of community homes in a small community in rural Ontario. Their program is, as the name suggests, very therapeutic, offering adults with developmental disabilities some predictability in their daily routine. With years of experience working with individuals with many different syndromes and various disabilities, their programs are created to give them enhanced life skills, helping them better navigate the world with their unique needs in mind.

Our team was approached by the management team at STEPS earlier this year to help design and install a new padded space for use in one of their residences. Looking to create a safe and quiet space for their residents to calm themselves or to de-escalate, our sensory room padding solutions came highly recommended. Given that each and every scenario with these types of padded rooms can be different in nature, they selected a partner with extensive experience in the space and one that can help them design and implement what is required.

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.