The question comes up on almost every project once a court is built or resurfaced: can we play after the kids go to bed, or after work in October when it’s dark by six? For a lot of Ontario homeowners and facility managers, the honest answer without lighting is no. A court that only works
Every conversation CrowAll has about resurfacing a tennis court, building a new pickleball court, or coating a backyard basketball pad eventually gets to the same question: what color should it be? Most people assume the answer is purely cosmetic, a choice about what looks good against the house or the landscaping. It isn’t. Court color
CrowAll gets a version of the same call every spring: a family with an outdoor sport court already on the property, or a chunk of unused side yard, asking whether it can handle a roller hockey rink. Sometimes it is a minor hockey parent tired of driving to an arena for stick time. Sometimes it
Shuffleboard keeps coming up in a way it did not five years ago. CrowAll’s product line has always listed it alongside basketball, bocce, roller hockey, pickleball, and volleyball courts, but for most of that time it was the request nobody actually made. That has changed. Retirement communities want a shuffleboard court next to their existing
Bocce shows up on more Ontario project lists every season. It used to be the sport you associated with an Italian social club or a retired uncle’s backyard, and in a lot of ways it still is, but the requests CrowAll gets now come from a much wider group: homeowners who want a low-key backyard
Ask around a tennis club or a municipal recreation department in Ontario right now and padel comes up more than it did even a year ago. The sport that CBC recently described as struggling to find its footing in Canada until the last few years has flipped hard the other way: demand for court time
A putting green used to be something you drove to. Now it is something a growing number of Ontario homeowners, golf clubs, and community facilities are putting in their own backyard, right next to the tennis court, pool, or patio. Search interest in putting green installation has climbed sharply over the past year, and the
We started getting calls about backyard volleyball courts a few summers back, usually from families who’d just spent a weekend setting up a net kit from a big box store, only to watch the poles lean sideways after the first real game or the “sand” turn into a dust bowl by August. The net and
Every November, CrowAll gets calls from Ontario homeowners who spent a weekend building a rink from a big-box kit two years ago and are now asking why the ice cracked by January, why one corner never froze properly, or why the yard turned into a swamp every spring after teardown. Almost none of it comes
Ask five Ontario contractors what a “multi-sport court” is and you will get five slightly different answers, but they all point at the same idea: one paved surface, several sports, and a lot more use out of a piece of land than a single-purpose court ever gives you. Tennis clubs are painting pickleball lines inside