The Best Seats
In The House

Working within our home province of Ontario, we were once again invited to work on a project with our friends and partners at the Thames Valley District School Board. Overseeing a number of schools in southern Ontario, we’ve had a long-standing relationship with this board and have been a part of many projects within their district that now serves over 84,000 students.

The fall season brings a lot of things including changing leaves, blossoming pumpkin patches and, of course, fall fairs. For many small communities across North America, these annual festivals and fairs are put on by local agricultural societies and offer their local communities a great opportunity to celebrate the fall harvest season.

With a rich history, many of these agricultural societies were established back in the late 1800s and are celebrating centennial anniversaries or greater. Having seen the changes over the decades first hand, many of these organizations have grown in size and are always looking to improve seating solutions for annual visitors. Whether this means adding additional seating or replacing existing and outdated grandstands, each spring and summer season, our phone rings with calls for help from ag societies looking to improve their seating situation in one way or another.

Branded as the University of Ontario Institute of Technology when it first opened its doors in 2002, the school has since grown to accommodate over 10,000 undergraduate students. The school adopted the brand name Ontario Tech University in 2018 and hasn’t looked back since. Now with two campuses in the Oshawa area, the school’s academic programs are administered by six faculties: the Faculty of Business and Information Technology, the Faculty of Education, the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, the Faculty of Health Science, the Faculty of Science, and the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities.

While we work with a lot of existing parks, schools and communities, we always love being a part of a brand new development as well. Being brought in early on a new project always marks an exciting opportunity for our organization and for the project we are working on.

After the announcement of a new ball diamond in Truro, Nova Scotia, our team was tapped to help design the new bleacher seating that will soon be placed in the new development. The complete development comprises two locations.

Located in Dieppe, New Brunswick in eastern Canada, École Anna-Malenfant is an all-french school that proudly preserves the region’s francophone and Acadian heritage through both academics and athletics. Serving as  home to nearly 700 students from kindergarten to grade five, the school’s gymnasium is a hub for sports, assemblies and other gatherings.

As with many established schools and facilities, upgrading outdated equipment is always top of mind. In the case of École Anna-Malenfant, we were brought in to help replace and install some new indoor bleachers for the school’s gymnasium. The existing telescopic bleacher system was deemed no longer safe for operation and so we were contacted to come up with a solution that could continue to grow with the school.

In what has been a project for over three years now, we were once again called upon by our friends at the City of Cornwall to help them continue their goal of upgrading the bleacher seating at many of their city parks. What kicked off in 2021 with three new 5-row bleachers in three separate parks, continued in 2022 with three new parks added to the list. In an effort to keep things rolling in the right direction, it was time earlier this year to upgrade another park’s seating structures.

In one of our largest telescopic bleacher jobs to feature our ground-breaking GameDay GraFX bleacher logos, this project had our whole team excited. Located at All Saints High School in Kanata, Ontario, we were brought in to provide an updated solution to some outdated athletic infrastructure.

An old set of wooden retractable bleachers in the gymnasium that had been manually operated, had fallen below the safety standards dictated by local and national building code requirements. We were therefore invited to visit the site to assess the situation. After taking detailed measurements, we got to work designing a new seating solution for one of the area’s largest high schools. With existing ‘pocket walls’, or walls that are designed to accommodate bleachers, the new bleachers would also have to fit within the existing dimensions.

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. 

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.

Purchasing any sort of large equipment can be a daunting task, particularly if you have very little experience working with the piece of equipment you’ve been tasked with sourcing. Generally speaking, bleachers tend to fall into this category of equipment that the general public doesn’t have a lot of experience with.

For the majority of us, purchasing something such as bleachers is something that might happen every once and a while (although for some, it becomes an on-going thing). As such, product education is something that becomes very important when making purchasing decisions. 

When it comes to bleachers, it is important to get the basics right, hence why we put together this quick reference guide outlining the ideal bleacher purchasing process.

Follow along as we go start-to-finish through every step of the bleacher buying process and hopefully shed some light on the product, the people that build them and how to streamline the process for your organization moving forward.