The Best Seats
In The House

The annual Puppets Up! Festival just wrapped up this past weekend in our hometown of Almonte, Ontario. The three-day festival runs each year during the month of August where puppets and performers provide hours of entertainment for families and children of all ages in the town’s historic downtown.

While downtown’s Mill Street was lined with vendors, live music and puppet performances, the main attractions took place in a number of tented theatres and inside some of Almonte’s historical buildings. Complete puppet performances took place at various times throughout the weekend in these designated locations, pleasing spectators from start to finish.

As with your vehicle or any other piece of machinery or equipment, properly scheduled maintenance is a sure-fire way to get the most out of that product’s life cycle. The same holds true for athletic equipment and infrastructure, whether that equipment has mechanical or moving parts or is simply stationary.

Larger-scale projects such as bleacher and grandstand seating are often overlooked, but require a good deal of attention. These large structures are often located outdoors 365 days of the year and while they are built to withstand terrible weather conditions, they too require regular maintenance to ensure your spectators are always safe.

We have compiled a quick checklist that can be used at any time of the year and hopefully on an ongoing basis that will help you and your facility maintenance staff perform routine checks.

The town of North Bay, Ontario was selected by the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) as the Ontario Regional Office for the construction of emergency landing fields in 1933. This base closed at the end of World War II, but was reopened in 1951, originally as a flying school and then as a fighter base. It was not until 1966 that this station was officially designated a Canadian Forces Base (CFB) and was known as CFB North Bay.

The Air Command was restructured in the early 1990’s and was renamed 22 Wing, as it is known as today. Today, this facility is responsible for providing surveillance, identification, control and warning for the aerospace defence of Canada and North America at the Sector Air Operations Centre.

One of our busiest departments is our padding department. We receive thousands of inquiries, questions and requests for custom padding designs and solutions each year. As one can very well imagine, this portion of our business has expanded well beyond the traditional athletic applications such as gymnasiums and athletic floor mats. Today, we proudly equip a wide variety of organizations and facilities with highly detailed and highly customized padding solutions, where no two projects are ever the same.

Aside from the traditional applications, we design and create custom padded room designs for use in treatment centres and healthcare facilities such as hospitals. We provide many of our commercial and industrial clientele with strategically placed wall, column and frame padding to keep employees safe and also offer a padding line specifically designed for use with veterinary facilities, keeping staff and animals safe during their visits.

As a company, we strive to offer our existing, current and prospective clientele the very best in sports and athletic infrastructure and areconstantly updating, tweaking and expanding our product offering to best serve our growing market. One large area of expertise our team proudly presents our clients with is upgrading outdating equipment in older facilities and operations. Often times, these upgrades arise due to safety issues or concerns, while other times they can simply be the by-product of technological and functional advancements in the design and construction of certain pieces of equipment.

One of our largest areas of upgrades exists within educational facilities. These facilities serve hundreds of participants and a variety of events each year and the athletic locations such as gymnasiums within these facilities require a multi-use approach to their equipment and fixtures.

When it comes to seating for use in educational facilities, buyers are traditionally looking for a few basic features to serve the demanding needs of their institution. Given the high level of traffic and constant use of lecture halls, these facilities require a chair that is durable, long lasting and relatively low maintenance.

We carefully select a number of fixed seating options to serve a wide range of facilities and organizations around the world and our sales team is highly knowledgeable and capable of finding the perfect fit. Here we will highlight a couple of our most popular fixed seating chairs for use in lecture halls and in other locations found in educational facilities. These products provide customers with an aesthetically pleasing seating solution that is built to withstand high-traffic areas and is easily cleaned and maintained, reducing scheduled maintenance costs.

Removing the barriers experienced by children with physical and mental disabilities was the goal when the Miracle League first started in April of 2000 in the state of Georgia. The idea behind this incredible organization has spread like wild fire and now consists of over 240 Miracle League Organizations serving over 200 000 children and adults who might not otherwise have the opportunity to play the game of baseball.

The Miracle League brings a unique angle to the traditional game of baseball that allows participants to blossom, not only as players, but as individuals. The proven ‘buddy’ system the league employs pairs each disabled player with an able-bodied player and fosters new friendships, skills and tremendous confidence in all who participate.

In the summer of 2012, a local Ottawa family approached both the Champions for Ottawa Baseball and the Orleans Rotary Club with expressed interest in bringing a Miracle League to Ottawa to support their son Bryce’s love of baseball. Bryce, who was born with cerebral palsy, wanted dearly to partake in a baseball league and his parents, Rolly and Michelle Desrochers, set out to make his dream a reality.

The sports equipment and infrastructure business is growing at a rapid pace with help from the development of new programming at educational, athletic and municipal organizations around the world. Technology has aided in this expansion as well, allowing companies like ours to build our truly customizable products and solutions for our end users.

We have spent over 35 years fine-tuning our business and growing it across North America and around the world. Over the course of the past two years, Sport Systems has been named to PROFIT magazine’s list of fastest growing companies in Canada.

Achieving this type of growth is not exclusive to our management’s growth strategy or expanding product lines. Rather, the growth in our company comes from years upon years of providing our customers and clientele with premium-quality products, customized solutions using state-of-the-art technology and most importantly, the very best in customer service and experience.

The 2015 Pan Am Games kicked off last week with great success on July 10, 2015. Three days into this fierce international competition, the host country, Canada is atop the medal count, closely followed by our neighbours to the south, the United States of America.

Having only been played on Canadian soil twice before, the return of the Pan Am Games offers sports fans a great glimpse into international sporting competition as the Games play host to 41 member nations competing in over 36 Pan Am sports.

In the fall of 2014 we began to install barrier netting at multiple sites on campus at the University of Toronto for test events leading up to the kickoff of the games this summer. Our team recently returned to Toronto, adding netting barriers to the grass playing fields at the University.

It was a hot night of racing at “Canada’s Toughest 1/3 Mile”, the historic Peterborough Speedway, as fans were treated to a full program of racing which included appearances by Ontario Mini Stocks, Renegade Trucks and Earl Ireland Auto Sales Late Models, the INEX Ontario Legends and Ontario Modifieds. 

Gould, a Ministock star from Capital City Speedway in Ottawa, decided to try his luck in central Ontario by hauling the Sport Systems Canada Inc. (SSCI) Mopar Ministock down Highway 7 to take on the locals at Peterborough and notched a 3^rd place finish in the first heat and a 4^th place finish in the 2^nd heat.