Winnipeg Blue Bombers to begin FieldTurf installation CFL Team will move into new home in 2013 and play on new FieldTurf Revolution surface WINNIPEG, MB (October 2, 2012) – The Winnipeg Blue Bombers are joining the revolution! Team officials have announced that the playing surface at Investors Group Field will be FieldTurf Revolution. Installation of the turf surface will begin this week. This new, state-of-the-art facility will be home to both the CFL’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers, and the CIS University of Manitoba Bisons. “We’re looking forward to the move to Investors Group Field, especially to our new FieldTurf Revolution surface,” said Blue Bombers President and CEO Garth Buchko. “Many of our peers in the Canadian Football League play on FieldTurf surfaces, and we feel with this installation it puts us on an even playing field. This product is proven throughout the industry to be one of the best, and we look forward to seeing it deliver results in our great city.” FieldTurf will be a welcome addition to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, especially in the cold winter months when the CFL Playoffs are played. Snowy climates don’t affect FieldTurf, and the product delivers the same performance features and easy maintenance even in the toughest times. With the University of Manitoba also playing its home games at the venue, usage rates will be high – however FieldTurf is built strong to withstand high frequency of games played on it without any wear and tear. FieldTurf Revolution is one of the most innovative products in the artificial turf industry. The FieldTurf Revolution fiber is a result of cutting edge science, engineering, and technology that provides customers with a soft yet strong monofilament fiber that’s been designed for high durability and performance. “The Winnipeg Blue Bombers have a strong history and we’re proud that FieldTurf will be part of their new home”, said FieldTurf President Eric Daliere. “With FieldTurf Revolution, Investors Group Field will rival the best stadiums in the country, and offer the Bombers a safe and high performing surface to excel on.” In the CFL, FieldTurf is the clear surface of choice. This list also includes the Montreal Alouettes, Saskatchewan Roughriders, Edmonton Eskimos and the Calgary Stampeders. FieldTurf also has an influence in CIS Football with just under 10 teams playing their home games on FieldTurf. In addition to many Canadian facilities, multiple NFL teams use FieldTurf including the New England Patriots, Detroit Lions, New York Giants/Jets, Atlanta Falcons, Seattle Seahawks and Indianapolis Colts.
Winnipeg CFL fans first in line to enjoy building boom Scott Edmonds WINNIPEG — The Canadian Press Dec. 04 2012 There is a building boom taking place in the Canadian Football League. CFL fans in four Canadian cities are looking forward to shiny new stadiums, packed with goodies that will make watching football more enjoyable and more expensive. The only completed facility so far is in Winnipeg, where the Blue Bombers will open Investors Group Field for the 2013 season, a year behind schedule. It’s loaded with luxury boxes, fancy club seating and other amenities to fatten the bottom line of the team and lighten the wallets of fans. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats will also have a change of scenery in 2013 as they demolish Ivor Wynne to build a smaller stadium for 2014. They’ll play next season in temporary digs at the University of Guelph. Unlike the Bombers, stuck with close to half the tab for their new home, the Ticats get a break because the $146-million stadium is a soccer venue for the 2015 Pan American Games. The federal government is picking up almost half, Ontario and the city the rest. The City of Ottawa, meanwhile, also has committed to a new stadium “as early as 2014” as part of its plan to re-enter the CFL. And, after their dome dream died, the Saskatchewan Roughriders settled for a new $278-million field expected in 2017, now that a bid by an anti-stadium group to stall the project has fizzled. The turf is already down and the final touches are being put on the new home of the Bombers, located on the grounds of the University of Manitoba, where it will also be home to the U of M Bisons. At an expandable 33,500 seats, it’s slightly larger than Canad Inns Stadium, located just west of Winnipeg’s downtown for more than half a century. But it’s more modern than the dated grandstand-style structure that let north-south winds roar down the field. It follows a U.S.-style bowl configuration and, while there is no dome, seating areas are covered by massive, rippling steel canopies. The Bombers had no trouble selling a record number of season tickets at their old field on the promise they would guarantee fans a seat in the new one. But they then took a lot of flak when their optimistic construction schedule wasn’t met, after winds stalled the installation of those massive beam-supported canopies. They had to play another season at Canad Inns, which they fortunately didn’t tear down. Fans scoffed but Bombers president Garth Buchko defended the original timetable and the construction company that produced it. “No one could have predicted the winter wind that we had, the abnormal, above-normal temperatures that we’ve had,” he said when the Bombers finally admitted their 2012 opening plan was a bust. “I’m not laying the blame on Stuart Olson Dominion, they have done yeoman’s work,” he said of the construction outfit. Hamilton Tiger-Cats president Scott Mitchell insists he isn’t worried about similar problems with the more modest stadium being built for his team. Ivor Wynne has to go before its replacement can be built. “I think everybody is extremely confident this will come in on time and on budget,” he says. He also feels the downsized regular capacity of 24,000 — about 5,000 fewer than Ivor Wynne — is a good fit for the city. Drawings show a traditional grandstand-style facility with open end zones and seating expandable to 40,000 or so for events like the Grey Cup or concerts. “I think it’s a perfect fit for us. . . We could have gone to a larger capacity. It would have decreased the fan experience in terms of all the amenities and everything we can do inside the stadium. “We really feel strongly that a beautiful sold-out 24,000-seat stadium in Hamilton will secure us for a long time.” Mitchell also wants to host another Grey Cup when the new stadium is built. The CFL’s showcase event hasn’t been held in Hamilton since 1996. “We’re looking forward to working with the city to bring a Grey Cup bid forward sooner rather than later,” he said. Ottawa has approved an ambitious redevelopment plan for Lansdowne Park and Frank Clair Stadium that will also include retail space. The city has been out of the CFL since the Renegades folded in 2006. Before that, the Rough Riders won nine Grey Cups in 120 years of football, 38 in the CFL as we know it now, before folding in 1996. Problems with Frank Clair have at least been contributing factors in both franchise failures and helped stall re-entry, which originally was to have taken place two years ago. “Now it’s a go, we can look fans in the eye and basically say we’re coming back to the nation’s capital,” CFL commissioner Mark Cohon said in October after city council approved the project. “Now it’s about building the stadium . . . it’s all about construction timelines now to be ready for the summer of 2014.” Jeff Hunt, co-owner of the as-yet-unnamed Ottawa franchise, is confident it will be built on time. The entire public-private cost of the project will be in the $450-million range, but that pays for more than just rebuilding Frank Clair. Saskatchewan originally asked the federal government to contribute much of the up to $431-million it wanted to spend on a new domed stadium for the Roughriders. The feds balked, saying they don’t contribute to professional sports venues (despite Hamilton’s back-door success) so a more modest $278-million plan was approved. The province is providing an $80-million grant, the city $73-million and the Roughriders will raise $25-million. In addition, the province will provide a $100-million loan to be repaid over 30 years. Construction is set to start in 2013 with the new stadium ready in 2017, according to the current timetable, but there isn’t a firm plan on the drawing board right now. It’s expected to look a lot like the new Investors Group Field in Winnipeg, with covered seating areas but an open-air field. “The sort of goal is to kind of keep the magic of a place like Mosaic Stadium and the fun that we’ve all enjoyed there, but kind of evolve it for the future,” says architect Dipesh Patel.
Excellent interview/article on the project manager of Investors Group Field. Relevant stadium info is excerpted - JM Builder happy to finish stadium; excited to call Winnipeg home Noah Erenberg Community News Commons January 8, 2013 The man hired to build the new stadium, Mike Clynes, came to Winnipeg two years ago from the United States to take on this project. CNC: Obviously you got the job to build Investors Group Field. What did the project look like at the very beginning? MC: I ended up starting work July 12, 2010. I came up here and started on the stadium project. At that time, there was one hand drawn drawing done, that’s all there was. That drawing was just the foundation plan. I was tasked with assisting design coordination, and tendering it as was required to provide a price – it was tendered in nine weeks. I had never tendered a project so fast and with a partial design; design was completed the last week of the nine-week tender period. It’s as fast track as it gets. The team decided to go with integrated project delivery team approach, that’s where the architects and engineers as well as myself and my sub-trades come together, and work as a collaborative team for the betterment of the stakeholders, the end users. Working as a team now you can fast track the project, you can reduce the cost and enhance the quality because you’re all on the same team, looking out for the same agenda, the same objectives, and that’s why we were able to do things in record breaking time, give back a lot of money, a lot of value engineering ideas. Value engineering just means you come up with strategies to produce something more efficient and less costly, but still with the same overall end result. And by giving back with value engineering, we’re able to produce things that enhance the fan experience which was the direction of the original developer. CNC: How will the fan experience at the new stadium be enhanced? MC: We have the two giant video screens, 120 feet by 30 feet, high definition on each end; we have 250 high definition TV’s, two on every column; we have a state of the art audio system with eleven speaker clusters on each side hanging from the roof and then one at every column on every level of the entire facility. We went with the largest seats, the best seats, 22 inch seats, Hussey Seating, the best in the industry. We gave everybody 17 inches of legroom so that they wouldn’t be bothered when someone walked in front of them, they won’t have to stand up when someone walks through. We over designed the restroom capacity by 50 percent so that your wait in line for the restroom is minimal. We gave it a flow so there’s no traffic; you go in one door, out the other. The concession capacity was over designed by fifty percent in order to increase the variety of food and drink that you can buy at the concessions. It has a large dining area on the east side. It’s one of the first stadiums in Canada to have both a university team housed with a professional league team; and complete locker rooms for both away team university and away team professionals as well as locker rooms for stars or performers and their crews. So, it’s well thought out. The ramp going down into the basement into field level is capable of handling buses or cranes, so that the away teams can pull their buses directly down in the basement, load and unload, from an enclosed area. The arch trusses, they are the highest and longest spanning in Canada and support five acres of roof. They are 590 metres long and a little over 200 feet high. Building it’s was a monumental feat that I’m proud to say I had a part in it. CNC: We’ll ask you in a second about your new found admiration for Winnipeg and your desire to make it your new home, but first how about a bit more detail about completing this project. What were some of the records that were broken when it came to the designing and building of this new stadium? MC: It’s the least cost on a per seat basis of any stadium that’s ever been built in North America which is really a feather in the cap because we spared nothing when it came to enhancing the fan experience. So, you not only get a world class stadium, you get one at the least cost, and it’s also the fastest a stadium of that size has ever been built. And it also won an award. I had this stadium done as a BIM 3-D model, and it won an award for the best looking largest steel structure that had been 3-D modelled that year. You can turn the model upside down, you can look through it, you can do co-ordination, I gave it to my superintendents before we had really started and we found a lot of errors and mistakes. So, instead of fixing them with jackhammers and torches, we fixed them with erasers. CNC: How about the least enjoyable aspect of the project? MC: Reading about my project in the press and knowing what’s written about it is not correct. CNC: Such as …? MC: There was actually a lot of aspects but some of the delays, some of the delays as a result of weather, I don’t think the proper things were said there, and nobody ever printed or said it’s the fastest stadium of this size that’s ever been built. We were released December 17, 2010 going into the holidays; I ordered the steel for our foundation piles and had it delivered January 5, 2011; we drove our first foundation pile January 6, 2011; and here we are 24 months later with a world class monument of a stadium that fast. I know that it set records and everybody else just thinks it’s late. CNC: Do you think it makes any difference now? MC: It really makes no difference. I can tell you that when people walk into that stadium for the first time this year, and they see the true jewel they got, they’re not going to remember anything about schedule, timing, any of the details, it’s just all going to go away, everybody is just going to go, ‘Wow’. CNC: So you think we are all going to be duly impressed when we walk in there? MC: I’ll tell you what, we’ve had suppliers that have supplied to all the NFL stadiums in the States, and they walked in and said, “Unbelievable.” Complete interview
Photo courtesy Marc Lagace The Manitoban April 8th, 2013 Looks more like a large hockey rink but it's almost completed
New Blue stadium lives up to the hype; now it's up to you Ed Tait Winnipeg Free Press May 17, 2013 We begin today with a confession: Yours truly is a sucker for gimmicks, easily distracted by shiny objects and often influenced by advertising hype. An example: Last winter we bought an ergonomic toilet seat which featured "injection moulded polypropylene construction." Sounds amazing, right? The reality? We spent about $50 on a plastic toilet seat no different than the old one. And so all this was rolling around in my little brain as I headed over to Investors Group Field Thursday morning for my first tour of the joint by Blue Bombers media relations director Darren Cameron. My intention was to view the facility with clear and objective eyes. And my initial take? The place is a freaking palace. A jewel. And it's going to perfectly complete the sporting facility trifecta in this town that already includes Shaw Park and the MTS Centre. Granted, this comes from a guy who spent 20-plus years at Canad Inns Stadium daily stepping around pigeon guano, trudging up crumbling stairs and cramming his six-foot frame into a seat to watch practice; a guy who cringed every time he stepped into the dungeon-like visitors' dressing room, gagged at the stench that forever hung in the director's lounge or watched water cascade down through stained ceiling tiles into the office complex whenever there was a downpour. I've sliced my hand open trying to open the rickety windows in the old press box, needed a front-end realignment on my car trying to navigate the craters in the parking lot and once -- as the last man in the building after deadline -- had to roll under a metal security fence in a giant dip in the concrete just to be able to head home. So excuse me for not being all that nostalgic about seeing the old place meet the wrecking ball. But the new facility will have none of that run-down, lipstick-on-a-pig feel to it when it opens next month. Granted, there were construction crews all over the place on Thursday frantically working to put the finishing touches on the place and there are a lot of cosmetic touches still to be completed. Still, it's easy to see the Bombers' new home is modern and state-of-the-art in every facet. We toured the football-operations department first. Every coach has his own office, there is a coaches' conference boardroom and a theatre large enough to seat 100 players. The locker-room is at least twice as large as their previous digs, the spacious new weight room and training facility makes the old look like something out of The Flintstones and equipment gurus Brad Fotty and Kevin Todd were like kids on Christmas morning while organizing their gear for training camp. A solid touch was the Bombers finally reaching out and recognizing more of their history in and around the locker-room. There are 10 life-size photos of the Grey Cup along the hallway, including the date and score of the team's championships. Empty spots along the same area are already designated to recognize the franchise's greatest players. Inside the player lounge, legendary defensive-line coach Richard Harris is remembered as his daily message to the troops dominates one wall -- "Morning, Big Blue." From field level, the facility seems enormous, but still somehow intimate. The two scoreboards weren't lit up on Thursday, but are huge. The seats are wide and feature cupholders, there is lots of leg room and not a bad view in the house. Many, many moons ago, I sat in the last row of Winnipeg Stadium with my late, great dad watching the Bombers disembowel Vince Ferragamo and the Montreal Alouettes. Remembering that, we ambled up to the last row of Investors Group Field and I can tell you the view from there is astonishing. The private boxes offer outstanding vantage points and the concession area will be part of an open concourse that will allow fans to still watch the game, not disappear for long stretches, as at Canad Inns Stadium. During the tour I must have used the word "unbelievable" at least 50 times. But "stunning" also fits. And "incredible," too. Most of all, I was left with a surreal feeling, a sense that the Bombers franchise has really gone from the outhouse to the penthouse. Understandably, there will be grumblings when the stadium opens -- most likely from some of my colleagues in the media as the press box is situated at about the 15-yard line, from those that don't like the parking set-up and from that segment of our population that bitches about sunny days. But as we exited the playing field near the end of the tour, I turned to Mr. Cameron, my tour guide, and said there was only one thing missing right now: fans. The photos I took of the stands and posted on my Twitter account don't do the stadium justice, frankly, and right now the building lacks the soul it gets from its customers and Bombers faithful. "Just wait until our home opener," said Cameron with a grin. "We've got some big things planned and this place will be really rocking and really impressive." We're already sold. And the fun hasn't even started yet.
Great looking stadium with all of the modern pro amenities you can ask for. IGF will hit the international spotlight for the 2015 WWC. With the NHL and CFL well engraved in Winnipeg can a third pro sport, soccer, get the fan base needed to be successful in the NASL would be the only question. A junior hockey team looks like a sure success playing out of MTS like in Calgary and Edmonton. NASL Soccer in EDM is hanging in there and the possibility of an NASL team in Calgary is also beign discussed. Could the same Prairie Canada rivalries between EDM, CAL, and WIN translate to soccer as well? Winnipeg have the venue and transforming the bigger venue into a smaller intimate venue for an NASL crowd like what is being done in Ottawa and looking like Hamilton as well will be a key.