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We all lead busy lives and at times, months, maybe even years seem to pass rather quickly. For facility managers, there are just so many moving parts to a gymnasium or other athletic facility that overtime, certain pieces of equipment might be overlooked.

It is no secret that the wall padding inside your gymnasium plays a very important role in the safety of those who use it. High speed sports such as basketball often have players bumping into wall surfaces as they pivot to get back in the game. These wall pads can also turn out to be quite versatile to many facility operators. When equipped with a removable wall padding product, individual slab mats are easily taken down for other uses such as gymnastics, wresting and other exercises.

But, at what point should you consider replacing your gym wall padding?

The answer to that question is not always apparent as there are many factors to be considered when evaluating the condition of your current padding:

In addition to traditional fitness applications such as training facilities and gymnasiums, a large portion of our custom padding department is dedicated to the production of fully padded rooms for a variety of different uses. While each padded room comes with different application requirements, the majority are used as a safety precaution in hospitals and health facilities or simply for providing relaxation, comfort or to heighten the senses.

As of late, we have been involved in projects aiming to design and build Snoezelen multi-sensory environments for clients around the globe. Here are some of the basics surrounding these popular sensory-focused padded rooms:

What is Snoezelen Multi-Sensory Environment?

This concept was actually designed by a pair of Dutch therapists in the late 1970’s who were working at a local centre for people experiencing intellectual disabilities. These therapists eventually would create an environment for their patients that would excite the senses and prove to be quite beneficial to their early subjects.

One of our busiest departments is our padding department. We receive thousands of inquiries, questions and requests for custom padding designs and solutions each year. As one can very well imagine, this portion of our business has expanded well beyond the traditional athletic applications such as gymnasiums and athletic floor mats. Today, we proudly equip a wide variety of organizations and facilities with highly detailed and highly customized padding solutions, where no two projects are ever the same.

Aside from the traditional applications, we design and create custom padded room designs for use in treatment centres and healthcare facilities such as hospitals. We provide many of our commercial and industrial clientele with strategically placed wall, column and frame padding to keep employees safe and also offer a padding line specifically designed for use with veterinary facilities, keeping staff and animals safe during their visits.

As we work our way into the month of July, our installation team remains busy with on-site visits and unique installations of athletic infrastructure across the country. Given the busy sport seasons that begin in the spring and start or extend through the summer months and into the fall, our team is firing on all cylinders.

We were commissioned recently by Life Time Athletic to complete a large project that was to span across two phases of work for their gymnasium. The first phase involved the design, supply and installation of basketball backstops, followed by the second phase that consisted of fire-resistant wall padding to be custom fit to the unique design of the gymnasium.

A priority of businesses, organizations and sport facilities is and always will be safety. Commercial buildings such as warehouses have stringent safety standards and are often rewarded for outstanding performance in maintaining and exceeding these standards.

Sporting facilities and institutions are no different. Appealing to a wide range of participants of different ages and skill levels, these organizations must always work toward providing their participants with the very best in safety and security.

Safety starts long before a product hits the shelves or the loading docks of any institution; it starts during the manufacturing process. As manufacturers ourselves, we constantly strive for more durable, long-lasting and safety-conscious products.

As one of Canada’s elite soccer development centres, the Farias Soccer Academy (FSA) turned to Sport Systems when the need arose for custom wall padding to cover the perimeter of the play area inside their facility.

With the focus on player development, the FSA recently introduced their new permanent facility, located in Bedford, Nova Scotia on Canada’s East Coast. The FSA management team is comprised of a father and son team with deep roots in the beautiful game. José is the patriarch of the academy, having started his career as a referee at the tender age of 16 and is an inspiring role model to the academy’s founder and principal coach, his son Eduardo.

Visualizing a finished project can prove to be difficult , especially when it comes to complex customizations of padded room configurations. With varying wall heights and shapes, doors, windows, electrical outlets and radiators or heating vents, padding a room can prove to be a challenge.

With some basic measurements and perhaps a quick site visit, our design team can quickly get your concept on paper, with every little detail taken into account. Our powerful 3D CAD Design software allows our designers to create, validate, communicate and manage the entire development process for each and every client.

Wall padding for padded rooms such as quiet rooms, seclusion rooms, time out rooms and remand rooms require not only that every piece of padding fit correctly, but that the walls have the right amount of padding with little to no exposure to the unpadded surface. Detailed measurements and images aid our design team in creating a mock design that helps our manufacturing department create the right padding, specifically cut for your unique design.

In addition to servicing and supplying a wide variety of institutions here in North America, we at Sport Systems are quickly creating an international demand for our product line. One area where we have noticed particular growth is the Middle East, where American style educational and athletic complexes are beginning to be developed at a rapid pace.

We recently were contacted by KAZOU Architectural Products located in Kuwait to supply athletic infrastructure equipment to the newly-built American United School of Kuwait.    

The American United School of Kuwait is an expansive 129 000 square foot educational facility which opened its doors in September of 2013 for students aged Pre-K – Grade 5, and has plans to open its middle school (Grades 6-8) this Fall of 2014. The school has continued plans to expand and open both its Middle & High School portions of the facility in fall of 2015.

With so many options and a variety of suppliers on the market today, we have compiled the following points of consideration for your next purchase.

Foam

Obviously a vital part to your wall padding, foam comes in a variety of options, most of which are pretty good. What you will want to make sure of is the ability of the padding to absorb shock from an impact. There are two units of measurement to help you identify this, foam density and indentation force deflection (IFD) (or indentation load deflection). Foam density is more of an indicator of the durability of the foam and has little bearing on the ability of the padding to absorb shock. While ILD is a measure of force required to compress a 4” thick piece of foam to a pre-determined percentage of its original thickness. Higher ILD rating is equal to more shock absorption.