The Best Seats
In The House

Serving as home to the Carleton University Ravens hockey teams, one of our recent projects landed us at the $13 million Ice House located on the school’s Ottawa campus. Boasting two NHL-sized ice pads along with twelve amazing dressing rooms, this facility is considered one of the Ottawa area’s best ice hockey facilities. 

With regulations requiring safety netting in NHL and other rinks across North America coming into place over a decade ago, many rinks are still continuing to make improvements to spectator safety. As with many sports, hockey is played with a very high-speed projectile that is capable of doing serious damage once shot out of play.

Long gone are the days of catching pucks in the seats. With a host of injuries suffered even on the professional level, many regulators stepped in and required a certain amount of netting to be placed in the most high-traffic areas.

With most arenas deciding to do the minimum requirement of placing netting behind the goals, many have noticed that there is still a risk of pucks landing in the crowd from shots or deflections fired down the sides of the ice surface as well.

We’ve long been a proponent of safety and thus barrier netting in hockey rinks and continue to see rinks around the world make these improvements. With that in mind, our partners at Carleton University reached out to our team to design a custom monofilament netting system to extend down the spectator side of the arena. The university was also looking for the new netting system to go around the penalty-box area as well.

Given the intricacies of that particular area of the arena, there was a fair amount of customization required. Our team visited the Ice House on location and took proper measurements as well as provided our recommendations for the required amount of netting needed to keep the arena safe from flying pucks.

The project was approved and sent to our drafting department who finalized the design for approval before moving to the manufacturing process. Once approved, the netting was manufactured and sent out for installation by our experienced team.

Just in time for the return of hockey practice and next season, the rink is now adorned with a completely customized and inclusive netting system designed with safety in mind.