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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.

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.

From traditional public school boards to private educational institutions, we proudly serve a broad range of institutions across both Canada and the United States.  Whether it is working in tandem with a number of schools across an entire school board, providing our services to small, specialized schools, or working with large-scale post secondary facilities, our experience in this sector knows no bounds.

Working in the private sector, one of our more recent projects brought us to the new location of Toronto’s Sathya Sai School.  Nestled into their new home in Scarborough, Sathya Sai offers students Ministry of Ontario curriculum that is enhanced with values-based education that currently serves students from Kindergarten to Grade 8.

Founded in 1949, St. Alban’s Boys and Girls Clubserves over 2,000 members per year, not to mention over 1,000 others across 18 satellite sites in the Greater Toronto Area.  It is here their dedicated staff and volunteers have been establishing a diverse range of programming including after-school programs, sports and athletic programs, camps, tutoring, mentoring and employment readiness programs for close to 70 years.

While we work with a number of Boys and Girls Clubs scattered throughout both Canada and the United States, this is not the first time the St. Alban’s Club has turned to us for help with improving their athletic facilities.  Previously, we were commissioned to install a state-of-the-art gym divider curtain for the club and once again, the club’s stakeholders tapped us for our expertise with regards to padding their gymnasium and stage.

Located roughly 3,000 km from our head offices, our most recent project was for an innovative new facility located in beautiful St. John’s, NL.  The Newfoundland and Labrador Sports Centre is a one-of-kind multi-sport athletic training facility giving both administrators and athletes across all age categories access to the very best athletic training equipment and resources.

The three-pronged facility boasts a high-performance training centre, a state-of-the-art strength, and conditioning area, as well as a full-service gymnasium.  In addition to local residents, the facility is also utilized by a variety of provincial sports organizations as a forum to train and increase athletic performance.

Comprising of four divisions, one of our more recent projects had us working closely with key stakeholders from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in conjunction with our esteemed colleagues at Tri-State Folding Partitions.

The 135-year-old educational institution’s divisions are made up of the Ethical Culture, Fieldston Lower, Fieldston Middle and Fieldston Upper divisions spread across two distinct campuses.  The midtown Manhattan campus is the home of the Ethical Culture program which helps students develop a level of understanding across multiple perspectives, developing imagination and fostering habits such as justice, fairness and empathy.

In nearby Bronx, New York, lies the 18-acre campus that is home to the remaining three divisions of the academic organization.  Here, the Fieldston Lower program fosters students from Pre-K to 5^th grade, the Fieldston Middle offers programming for middle school-aged students and is completed with the high school curriculum of Fieldston Upper.

While generally left for our padding department professionals, many of our customers and end users actually opt to perform their own custom cut-outs on their newly-ordered wall padding.  In the event of forgotten electrical switches, altering existing padding is a very viable option for many and not terribly difficult to undertake.

The name of the game is patience.  As with any custom work, slow and steady typically wins the race and in this case, saves you from having to order additional pads or replacement vinyl for improperly cut holes.   As many contractors will tell you, measure twice, cut once. 

Located in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, The Tech Academy is an educational facility founded on artistic, athletic and academic excellence, offering students a unique opportunity to prepare for further education. 

The institution is housed in a historic building, adding to the educational establishment’s charm and prestige.  The academy serves students ranging from grades 9-12 with courses offered in the arts, music, business, Canadian and world studies, English, French, mathematics, health and physical education, science, social science and more.

Once again, we were hard at work at the prestigious Julia Dyckman ANDRUS Center in Yonkers, New York.  Earlier in the fall, we were involved in padding two other rooms located in the facility with the help of our partners at Tri-State Folding Partitions.

In that project, our team designed a complete padding solution for a small support room in the facility that had to accommodate an existing playhouse and structure previously installed in the room.

With that project in the rear view, our team once again got to work for ANDRUS, this time on a much larger sensory room.  These rooms are used to create an environment completely removed from outside distractions and come complete with audio and visual aids, promoting extreme relaxation.