The Best Seats
In The House

Spring is officially here in North America and the annual scramble to get prepared for the upcoming outdoor sports season is in full swing. As facility owners, operators and maintenance staff begin preparations, the necessary checks and maintenance items are often on the top of their to-do lists.

While routine checks can seem daunting and time-consuming, they could be the difference between a safe spring, summer, and fall season or one filled with broken equipment or worse, injured spectators or participants. 

With all this in mind, here are a few items your team should be checking on this time of year before outdoor pieces of equipment experience extensive use.

In line with the University of North Carolina’s thrilling win over Gonzaga earlier this week for the college basketball National Championship, one of our most recent projects featured Tar Heel team colours.

Once again, we traveled to the wonderful and wild Canadian west to Cold Lake, Alberta, this time to work with L'école Voyageur, part of Alberta’s French-speaking conseil scolaire centre-est school board.

The school, which operates exclusively in the French language, needed a specialized padding solution for use in their gymnasium and turned to our expert sales team for advice.  While padding can sometimes be considered rather rudimentary, the truth is, it is often far from routine and that was certainly the case with this project.

The school was interested in placing wall padding beneath their basketball systems, but the layout of the gymnasium made it slightly more complex from a design standpoint.  As every facility is different, the gymnasium at école Voyageur featured a doorway just to the left of the basketball system, which obviously would not allow for a standard wall padding installation.

As we round out the tradeshow season, we come upon one of the last, but certainly not the least of tradeshows we always enjoy taking part in; the Parks and Recreation Ontario (PRO) Educational Forum and Tradeshow.

No two tradeshows are the same and we truly enjoy each one we have a chance to take part in, as each has something slightly different to offer and is what ultimately keeps us returning year after year.  As we look forward to meeting with our American partners in the fall at the Athletic Business Conference, the PRO conference allows us to do that as well, but in our home province of Ontario.

Here in Ontario, not many other tradeshows act as such a strong leader and hub for recreational and community planning as the PRO show and while it is based in Ontario, the show attracts vendors, speakers and attendees from across both Canada and the United States.

With an estimated 70 million cyclists in the United States alone, accommodating bicycles is no longer simply a perk to municipal residents or employees of large corporations, it is becoming a necessity. In many cases, bicycle racks are utilized to organize and allow cyclists a safe place to temporarily store their bicycles.

These racks work wonderfully and will likely remain in use for years to come but they do lend themselves to exposure to the elements and to the possibility of theft.

When it comes to the ultimate in protection for your bicycle, there is not much that can compare to one of our bike lockers. Completely designed using UV-stabilized, graffiti, fire, and abrasion-resistant polyethylene, these lockers are built to last. In addition to weathering storms of all kind, the contents of these lockers are secured with lockable, double-walled doors and reinforced walls.

While we typically service the industrial and institutional markets, oftentimes we lend our prowess to the residential crowd where and when possible.  From installing indoor or outdoor basketball systems, barrier netting projects, or providing hockey goals for backyard rinks, our products are used around the home more than most think.

One such area in which we provide a great deal of coverage for the residential market is within our custom padding department.  Due to the wide variety of uses and specific needs, we are seeing a much higher volume of residential padding projects coming into our facility.

With its first winner crowned in 2006, Kraft Hockeyville has become an annual event leaving an unmistakable impression across Canada’s minor hockey players and the communities in which they reside.

As part of the annual competition, communities across Canada are nominated for the chance to be crowned Kraft Hockeyville.  The criterion for nomination requires a strong sense of family, community and hockey, with each winner receiving up to $100,000 worth of upgrades to their local arena.

While many of these arenas are undoubtedly known for their frosty winter mornings and hockey players of all ages, they also serve as hubs of the communities they call home.  In addition to minor hockey leagues, these community institutions are used for both private and community events such as fundraisers, sports clubs, receptions and often serve schools and other groups within the community.

One of our recent projects brought us to the picturesque Canadian prairies to the Athol Murray College of Notre Dame located in Wilcox, Saskatchewan.  Wrought with humble beginnings back in the 1920’s, today this high school is one of the premier private Catholic education institutions in the country, committed to developing young men and women to become purposeful leaders with virtuous character and a global mindset.

Known for their competitive spirit and propensity for victory, the Notre Dame Hounds are renowned for their athletic prowess.  In 2006 the school’s athletic programming yielded more than $1.6 million in academic and athletic scholarships to American and Canadian universities.

From traditional public school boards to private educational institutions, we proudly serve a broad range of institutions across both Canada and the United States.  Whether it is working in tandem with a number of schools across an entire school board, providing our services to small, specialized schools, or working with large-scale post secondary facilities, our experience in this sector knows no bounds.

Working in the private sector, one of our more recent projects brought us to the new location of Toronto’s Sathya Sai School.  Nestled into their new home in Scarborough, Sathya Sai offers students Ministry of Ontario curriculum that is enhanced with values-based education that currently serves students from Kindergarten to Grade 8.

Whether we would like to admit it or not, the times are changing more rapidly than most of us ever thought possible.  As many of us continue to adapt and change course to reflect the demands, needs and wants of both the public and athletic communities, exciting things are happening in our industry on a daily basis.

With new stadiums being erected all over Canada and the United States, these new design trends are not strictly reserved for professional sports. Collegiate, community and private facilities are all being swept into this massive wind of change as well.

With this in mind, here are a few of the biggest trends sweeping the athletic facility industry and how many planners, designers, and fabricators are keeping pace.