The Best Seats
In The House

Located roughly 3,000 km from our head offices, our most recent project was for an innovative new facility located in beautiful St. John’s, NL.  The Newfoundland and Labrador Sports Centre is a one-of-kind multi-sport athletic training facility giving both administrators and athletes across all age categories access to the very best athletic training equipment and resources.

The three-pronged facility boasts a high-performance training centre, a state-of-the-art strength, and conditioning area, as well as a full-service gymnasium.  In addition to local residents, the facility is also utilized by a variety of provincial sports organizations as a forum to train and increase athletic performance.

Safety is paramount in athletic and educational facilities, as more and more products on the market today are built to keep participants and spectators safe.  Traditionally speaking, most would pigeonhole our organization as one that can often be found designing and hanging both permanent and removable wall padding in gymnasiums across Canada, the United States and the rest of the world.

While we certainly do take on many wall padding jobs fit for schools, colleges, and athletic facilities, we are home to a massive custom padding department that has expanded exponentially over the past number of years, serving more and more niche markets.

Named after one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation, George Brown College boasts three full educational campuses in the heart of downtown Toronto.  Serving a variety of programs covering arts, design, business, community services, early childhood education, and construction and engineering technologies, George Brown College is asserting itself as a leading educational institution in North America.

We were connected with key stakeholders at George Brown College in the summer of 2016 when they reached out to us with the interest of revamping their basketball systems and gymnasium facility at their St. James Campus. 

All told, there was a total of six basketball systems that were in need of replacement but the facility itself presented some unique logistical challenges, particularly when it came to moving large equipment in and out of the location.

Generally speaking, we all have some sort of an idea as to what constitutes sports barrier netting.  As a large portion of our business, custom netting solutions for sports applications are vital for the safety and well-being of both participants and spectators.

Coming in all shapes and sizes, our netting barriers can be found in parks, athletic facilities and sports fields across Canada and the United States.  Ranging from portable or permanent barrier netting solutions surrounding soccer pitches and baseball diamonds, to lining golf fairways and driving ranges, our netting solutions span across a wide variety of uses.

Aside from its most conventional use, there are a surprisingly large number of other applications our custom netting department is tasked with each and every year.  Here are a few netting applications we can design that you may not have thought about.

Bringing us to the far eastern regions of Canada’s capital city, our most recent project brought us to Gloucester, Ontario at the Louis Riel Secondary School.  After a brief stay at another location, Louis Riel Secondary School permanently opened at its current location in 1980 and immediately got to work expanding programming and facilities within the establishment.

Originally serving strictly grades 9-12, the school expanded in 2003 offering programming to grade7 and 8 students, today it boasts a student body of over 700 students.

In addition to strong academic programming, the school is home to a robust athletics platform serving a variety of sports such as basketball, golf, hockey, soccer, volleyball and more.  Additionally, the school is home to a unique facility among high schools in the region; the Dome @ Louis Riel.

With literally millions of gymnasiums, athletic complexes and other facilities here in North America, designing athletic equipment with a one-size-fits-all approach would be useless.  Ranging from facilities built 30 or more years ago to the high-tech and architecturally stunning facilities we are slowly becoming accustomed to today, no two gymnasiums are alike.

When it comes to basketball systems, in particular, much of the configuration and installation methods are heavily dependent on the space allotted, ceiling height and other architectural nuances.  With that in mind, a lot of facilities today opt for either a wall-mounted basketball system, a ceiling-suspended system, or both.

During the fall of 2016, an opportunity presented itself that would allow us to work closely with a school district in the picturesque Canadian Maritimes.  The opportunity was sent to tender by the Anglophone South School District, a district that operates 79 public schools serving over 10,000 students in Kings and Queens Counties in New Brunswick.  The school district was looking to acquire bleacher seating systems for a few gymnasiums in three different schools in the district.

Depending on the intended use and proposed space allowances, our line of gym divider curtains can come equipped in a number of different variations.  As no two facilities alike, the same can be said for our five main gym divider curtain models, each engineered and manufactured to conform to different designs and situations.

Used to safely and effectively separate areas in large spaces such as gymnasiums and other facilities, these curtains are constructed with heavy-duty vinyl and mesh (depending on configuration) and are built to withstand abuse.

What might be more significant than their rugged appearance is the power that safely drives these curtains.  With busy schedules, multiple-use facilities need a curtain that can be either opened or closed within a matter of minutes.  The average height of the majority of school gyms, for example, start at around 25-30 feet so as one can imagine, these curtains require a fair bit of power to move them around.

It certainly feels like just yesterday we were reviewing our projects from 2015 and thanking our suppliers, customers and partners for everything they helped us achieve during what was a banner year for our organization.

Once again in 2016, the story remains the same.  We again had a historic year in 2016, marking tremendous growth, new opportunities, expanded operations and a robust customer base.  As wonderful as all of those are, we still could not have done it without each and every member of our esteemed team, those with whom we have conducted business with during our 35+ year history and all of our partners around the world.

We once again were named among Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies in 2016’s PROFIT 500 – a feat we have achieved three out of the last four years.   We want to thank everyone, once again, for their support this past year and we sincerely look forward to connecting with you and many new organizations in the coming year.

As promised, here are a few of our most notable projects we had the pleasure of completing in 2016:

Comprising of four divisions, one of our more recent projects had us working closely with key stakeholders from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in conjunction with our esteemed colleagues at Tri-State Folding Partitions.

The 135-year-old educational institution’s divisions are made up of the Ethical Culture, Fieldston Lower, Fieldston Middle and Fieldston Upper divisions spread across two distinct campuses.  The midtown Manhattan campus is the home of the Ethical Culture program which helps students develop a level of understanding across multiple perspectives, developing imagination and fostering habits such as justice, fairness and empathy.

In nearby Bronx, New York, lies the 18-acre campus that is home to the remaining three divisions of the academic organization.  Here, the Fieldston Lower program fosters students from Pre-K to 5^th grade, the Fieldston Middle offers programming for middle school-aged students and is completed with the high school curriculum of Fieldston Upper.