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With hopes of better developing the future Sidney Crosbys of the world, Canada’s national pastime’s governing body passed new rules defining rink size for the nation’s youngest hockey players.

Hockey Canada announced in late March that it would be implementing a new rule that would see all rink sizes shrink by 50 percent to accommodate players 6 years and under.  While the organization has been advocating for this age-related rink sizing for nearly three decades, it is now only making it official, even though a number of provincial amateur hockey organizations already require it.

The move is expected to make better players out of younger children as much time is wasted chasing stray pucks across large ice surfaces.  While it is certainly great exercise for the children, Hockey Canada’s vice-president of membership development believes the smaller surface allows children a better opportunity to get a real feel for the game.

Situated along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River across from the great city of Montreal is the city of Longueuil, Quebec. As one of Montreal’s largest suburbs, Longueuil is home to many of Montreal’s commuting community, as most residents travel to Montreal for work each day.

As such, Longueuil is home to a variety of community and recreation-focused facilities and parks, making it one of the area’s most desirable neighbourhoods.

Through our RFQ service, the municipality reached out to our team to design, supply and install several netting barriers across the city’s many parks. With the spring season getting underway and anticipating the upcoming busy baseball, soccer and other sports seasons, our team immediately got to work on the project.

Image: USA Pickleball Association Facebook

It’s not quite tennis, not quite badminton and not quite ping pong; it’s pickleball and it’s one of the fastest growing activities on the planet. Designed for fun at all ages and skill levels, pickleball utilizes many of the elements found in related racket sports but instead uses a modified ball and paddle.

Created in the American Pacific northwest by a trio of dads, the game was invented to keep their children busy after they grew tired of traditional summer activities. Crafting the original equipment and creating a unique set of rules, the game is now sweeping across Canada and the United States as more Asian and European countries also begin to install custom courts.

Recently, we headed back to the Waterloo region of Ontario where just last year we aided the University of Waterloo in revamping their Columbia Icefields Centre.  The athletic complex, which opened in early 2014 came to our team when the need for a customized bleacher solution was required for the arena within the multi-use facility.

It was then our team installed a three-row arena bleacher system complete with extended rear decking for standing room viewing, contoured seating with numbering and custom vinyl end curtains complete with the University’s logo.

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.