The Best Seats
In The House

We’re fortunate to call Canada’s National Capital Region home for a variety of reasons, one of which being, the choice of professional sports. Depending on how long you’ve been in the area, you would know that it was something generations of residents long ago rallied around and eventually built. With CFL football and OHL hockey being long-standing traditions here in Ottawa, we eventually were awarded our own NHL team in the mid-1990s and have continued to expand on athletic offerings ever since.

Given the industry we serve, it’s truly a bonus that we are often called upon to help service and work alongside these prestigious organizations and when the call came in to help out one of Ottawa’s newest franchises, we were chomping at the bit.

Working within our home province of Ontario, we were once again invited to work on a project with our friends and partners at the Thames Valley District School Board. Overseeing a number of schools in southern Ontario, we’ve had a long-standing relationship with this board and have been a part of many projects within their district that now serves over 84,000 students.

Working alongside key stakeholders from the board, our team was brought in to help with the design and build of a new track and field for Sherwood Secondary School. Serving as home to the school’s Saints athletics department, the board was planning for some major upgrades to the school’s outdoor field. In addition to a brand new track and beautiful field, a request for bleacher seating was made and we were quick to answer the call.

The fall season brings a lot of things including changing leaves, blossoming pumpkin patches and, of course, fall fairs. For many small communities across North America, these annual festivals and fairs are put on by local agricultural societies and offer their local communities a great opportunity to celebrate the fall harvest season.

With a rich history, many of these agricultural societies were established back in the late 1800s and are celebrating centennial anniversaries or greater. Having seen the changes over the decades first hand, many of these organizations have grown in size and are always looking to improve seating solutions for annual visitors. Whether this means adding additional seating or replacing existing and outdated grandstands, each spring and summer season, our phone rings with calls for help from ag societies looking to improve their seating situation in one way or another.

As sports equipment and infrastructure specialists, one of our main goals is to promote safety through our product offering. Whether it is ensuring that a new set of bleachers  is completely up to code or the adequate amount of padding is used in a gymnasium, we’ve always got our eye on safety.

When it comes to larger equipment items such as gym dividers, it’s an area we tend to pay a great deal of attention to. Many school gyms across North America are equipped with some sort of divider for large gymnasium spaces and in many of those cases, those systems have been in place for a number of years or even decades.

Branded as the University of Ontario Institute of Technology when it first opened its doors in 2002, the school has since grown to accommodate over 10,000 undergraduate students. The school adopted the brand name Ontario Tech University in 2018 and hasn’t looked back since. Now with two campuses in the Oshawa area, the school’s academic programs are administered by six faculties: the Faculty of Business and Information Technology, the Faculty of Education, the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, the Faculty of Health Science, the Faculty of Science, and the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities.

Serving more than 25,000 students, one of our recent projects landed us at Thompson Rivers University in beautiful British Columbia. The school, which offers over 140 on-campus programs and 60-plus Open Learning programs, continues to grow across its main campus in Kamloops and across its secondary campus in Williams Lake. 

In addition to its highly respected academics programming, TRU is also home to the Wolfpack athletics program, which has been making a name for itself in soccer, basketball and volleyball, among others. As part of their budding athletic programming, our team was contacted to help design some padding for use in the gymnasium at the Kamloops campus. Key stakeholders at TRU were looking to provide protection for their student athletes from collisions into walls below basketball nets; one of the most common areas we provide padding for in gymnasiums.

While we work with a lot of existing parks, schools and communities, we always love being a part of a brand new development as well. Being brought in early on a new project always marks an exciting opportunity for our organization and for the project we are working on.

After the announcement of a new ball diamond in Truro, Nova Scotia, our team was tapped to help design the new bleacher seating that will soon be placed in the new development. The complete development comprises two locations.

Located in Dieppe, New Brunswick in eastern Canada, École Anna-Malenfant is an all-french school that proudly preserves the region’s francophone and Acadian heritage through both academics and athletics. Serving as  home to nearly 700 students from kindergarten to grade five, the school’s gymnasium is a hub for sports, assemblies and other gatherings.

As with many established schools and facilities, upgrading outdated equipment is always top of mind. In the case of École Anna-Malenfant, we were brought in to help replace and install some new indoor bleachers for the school’s gymnasium. The existing telescopic bleacher system was deemed no longer safe for operation and so we were contacted to come up with a solution that could continue to grow with the school.

In what has been a project for over three years now, we were once again called upon by our friends at the City of Cornwall to help them continue their goal of upgrading the bleacher seating at many of their city parks. What kicked off in 2021 with three new 5-row bleachers in three separate parks, continued in 2022 with three new parks added to the list. In an effort to keep things rolling in the right direction, it was time earlier this year to upgrade another park’s seating structures.