The Best Seats
In The House

One of our most recent projects brought us back to beautiful Brampton, Ontario. Working in a city that seems to just keep on growing, this job brought us to Sesquicentennial Park in Brampton North where key stakeholders at the city were looking to shore-up some new safety padding for the park’s baseball diamonds.

Once known as Countryside Park, Sesquicentennial has become one of the city’s busiest outdoor destinations. It is a large, multi-diamond complex featuring eight slo-pitch fields (most of them lit), a field house, and change rooms. In recent years the city has also built out an Activity Hub on the site which includes an accessible playground, splash pad, fitness equipment, shade shelters, picnic areas, and walking connections that pull in families who may never pick up a bat. Tournaments, league nights, kids in the water, seniors on the paths, and vehicles in the lots all share the same piece of ground, and that is exactly the kind of park where a well-hit softball stops being “just part of the game.”

Fortunately for us, we have a long history with the City of Brampton, particularly with baseball and softball netting barriers, which made this one a natural fit. It’s no secret that new and upgraded multi-purpose parks are in high demand across growing neighbourhoods, but many of them create a familiar safety problem. With local batters upping their game, home runs and foul balls leaving the baseball diamonds and finding playgrounds, walkways, parking, or neighbouring uses are a growing concern. Softball diamonds at a park like this stay busy from morning clinics through evening league play, so when the rest of the park is equally busy, containment is not something that is optional.

For this project we designed, engineered, and installed two custom netting barriers — one for each of the two diamonds that needed protection. Each barrier stands 38 feet above grade and runs approximately 170 feet in length. The systems were specified to keep home-run and foul balls from leaving the high-risk zones of the diamonds and to help keep bystanders and vehicles safe without turning the fields into cages.

After getting the thumbs up from the city, our installation team was on-site, completing the work over the course of the summer months. It is yet another project we are proud to have been a part of in providing a turnkey netting installation for a municipal partner we already know, in a north-end park that has to serve athletes, young families, and everyone in between on the same afternoon.

If your municipality, school, or community group is planning a new diamond, or is simply trying to make an existing multi-use park safer, reach out to a member of our team. We will design, engineer, and install a barrier that fits the site.