The Best Seats
In The House

In a project that has been a long-time coming, our team, along with many others are proud to announce that the Thunderchild Wellness Centre is now serving the community. In a project that began about five years ago, hit a few snags along the way, but eventually got back on track, is a testament to the hard work and dedication of everyone involved.

The new 90,000 sq. ft. facility spared no expense for the Thunderchild First Nation community. Boasting a full-sized hockey rink, a fieldhouse featuring the ability to switch between an indoor soccer pitch, a lacrosse field, three volleyball courts, basketball courts and badminton courts. Beyond the athletic space, the center also features an entire medical wing, a fitness center and daycare facility. With hopes of becoming a central gathering point for the Nation and neighboring communities, it will also serve as a place to hold special and sacred community-based events such as weddings, band meetings, open town halls, indoor pow wow's, ceremonial and cultural events. 

As we’ve said many times before, upgrading outdated and unsafe bleachers is a big part of what we do and shows very little signs of slowing down. Given that these seating structures are often located outdoors, years of abuse from the elements and spectators alike in time, turns to ruin.

Add in updated safety code requirements and you’ve got a situation in which schools, municipalities and other facilities are beginning to scramble to get all of their bleacher seating up to speed. 

Ahead of this year’s summer Olympic Games in Paris, Cadillac Fairview teamed up with Team Canada in an effort to expand opportunities for play this summer with the launch of “CF Play Makers,” - an initiative for school-aged children to harness the power of sports and playtime.

Looking to give children more access to physical play opportunities, the program aims to promote the many health benefits of physical play while inspiring a passion for playtime and organized sports. Starting in Ontario, the program will spread across Canada by refurbishing play spaces at schools and other community spaces.

With the bats officially swinging now in southern Ontario, this project came to fruition long before this year’s baseball season got underway. During the fall of 2023, the Municipality of North Middlesex reached out to us to help them keep balls in play at a couple of their local ball diamonds and we vigorously answered the call.

With the big bats dominating last year’s season, concerns were on the rise at both Parkhill Park and Ailsa Craig Community Park. With homes located nearby, balls were occasionally landing very close by or, in some cases, inside the yards and key stakeholders wanted to rectify the situation before someone got hurt. Add in the fact that these two ball diamonds were now also closely situated to new skateparks, the municipality wasted no time sourcing a solution to protect those users as well.

Working closely with our esteemed partners at Tri-State Folding Partitions, we were happy to be brought in to collaborate on another project in beautiful Newark, New Jersey. As a budding extension of the greater New York metropolitan area, Newark offers plenty of opportunities and our partners at Tri-State are always leading the charge.

On this project, we were brought in to aid with a request from an elementary school located in the North Ward of Newark. With key stakeholders from Franklin Elementary working directly with Tri-State on some upcoming renovations to their gymnasium, the discussion around wall padding was thrust to the forefront. Looking to provide students and athletes with an all-encompassing padding solution to the gymnasium, they were in search of some highly customized padding designs.

Nestled quietly in one of Ottawa’s western suburbs lies the   Amberwood Village Golf and Recreation Club. Situated on 50-acres land, the club is now made up of a challenging 9-hole golf course, a 60-foot heated outdoor swimming pool and 10 brand new pickleball courts.

While the golf course has always been abuzz with local golfers, it is the newly-minted pickleball courses that seem to have experienced the biggest amount of growth. Following the pandemic, the Club went through a number of improvements across all of their facilities, including the pool and pickleball courts. 

One of the most common upgrades we perform in school gymnasiums is the removal and replacement of outdated folding partitions. These large and clunky structures were once used to separate gymnasiums, but were ultimately found to be potentially hazardous causing a number of unfortunate accidents, including severe injury and even death. So when their functionality begins to look compromised, most operators are quick to look for a replacement.

The growth of soccer here in North America has been remarkable, to say the least. The sport’s popularity has exploded in both Canada and the United States over the past two decades and shows no signs of slowing down.

As more state-of-the-art pitches, fields and complexes continue to be designed and built, each one seems to be more impressive than the last. 

We were fortunate to have been brought in on the construction side of one such complex in the beautiful Waterloo area of Ontario. The Cambridge Soccer Centre has been the brainchild of the family-oriented city of Cambridge. After having developed the plans for the project in 2018, it officially got off the ground in 2021, garnering plenty of excitement for the future of soccer in the southwestern Ontario city.

Located just south of the city’s downtown core, the Heron Road Community Centre has been a staple for Ottawa residents since it first opened. The community hub now offers a wide selection of recreational activities for preschoolers to older adults, including dance classes, piano lessons, summer camps, sports, martial arts and fitness classes. 

The facility also boasts a weight and cardio room, a number of multi-use rooms, a kitchen, a new theatre, and a full-service gymnasium. Having a longstanding relationship with the City of Ottawa, we were brought in recently to assess the condition of a number of existing basketball systems in the aforementioned gymnasium.

It seems as though a new story of a set of condemned bleachers pops up in news headlines each and every week. As schools and municipalities scramble to install seating ahead of upcoming sports and summer seasons, there are times when issues such as code compliance get overlooked and can result in brand new bleachers surrounded by yellow caution tape. While code compliance can vary across municipalities and other jurisdictions, there are a few set guidelines that seem to transcend all of these regulations.

Those mostly include design aspects such as double-footboards and double-riser planks used on the top row of seating but can include other items such as guardrails on certain sizes of bleacher seating as well.