Powerade Centre Tickets

Powerade Centre
The Powerade Centre is a 4,980-seat multi-purpose arena in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. It is formerly the Brampton Centre for Sports & Entertainment. It was built in 1998. Its main arena is home to two major hockey teams, the Brampton Battalion of the OHL, and the Brampton Thunder of the NWHL.

The main arena is part of larger community complex that includes three smaller ice pads, and outdoor softball diamonds. It is located at 7575 Kennedy Road, on the south-side of the city, between 407 ETR and Steeles Avenue.

The seats are purple in the main arena, with private suites located around the top of seating area. They have a standard four-sided scoreboard which is purple to go with the arena theme color. The concourse is horseshoe-shaped. Fans cannot walk all the way around the arena in a circle.

Designed as a multi-purpose sports and entertainment venue, The Powerade Centre hosts events that include home games for Ontario Hockey League"s Brampton Battalion and the Majors Lacrosse Team the Brampton Excelsior"s.

The Powerade Centre looks like a hockey arena from the outside but is unusually clad in reflective aluminum. It makes the arena glow on a sunny day. The Battalion"s part of the arena is rounded like most new hockey rinks, but it also has a massive square attachment to its side.

That massive attachment, as we soon found out, is three other hockey rinks. The Powerade Centre doubles as a community arena and there are four ice surfaces in the building along with requisite dressing rooms and the like.

The main part of the building, though, has two main entrances - one on each side - and entering the building feels like entering an older rink. The hallways are painted in a dark battleship grey like many old barns, and the "bunker" feeling of the building continues. The halls feature many kiosks and food stands, and the inadvertent retro atmosphere is obvious. There is also exposed concrete everywhere, just like in a real bunker.

As soon as you enter the seating area, the seats are laid out in a "U" shape and every single one is a peevishly bright purple. Ugh. They"re also narrow for a new building, and leg room, while great compared with some of the league, isn"t fantastic for a new edifice.

In fact, perhaps the best word to describe the Powerade Centre would be "spartan". There is luxury boxes running down both sides of the building. The views from the seats are universally good.

The fourth side of the building, or the space at the top of the "U", features a restaurant, glassed in, at the top, and the "bleachers" at the bottom. The bleachers are about five rows of benches, much like at a ballpark, and apparently are set aside for the "rowdies". Battalion logos are painted on the wall behind the bleachers which was pretty cool to stare at all game. The music in Brampton was excellent, not too loud and very well-suited to my own musical tastes.

The scoreboard is small for a new building, but it gets the job done. The building also features the Brampton Sports Hall of Fame, which is worth investigating in an intermission. There are the banners from the Battalion"s successes over the years, as well as banners from the Bunker"s other tenant, the Brampton Excelsior"s lacrosse team.

The Battalion enter the ice from under a giant inflatable tank, and before the game, the sound system plays battle sounds. The announcer, instead of announcing "last minute of play in the period", instead says "one minute until cease-fire".

The mascot is "Sarge" and is a strange-looking soldier type. Finally, whenever the Battalion scores a goal, the sound system plays Edwin Starr"s "War" which, frankly, is awesome. In general though, the military theme feels tacked on, and doesn"t really fit with the suburban locale and purple seats.

Perhaps the worst feature at the Powerade Centre comes from the fact that it was thrown up in a hurry in a little-developed area. There is only one way to get to the building by car.

While the Centre has a massive free parking lot, there are only two small entrances to the lot from Kennedy Road, which itself is only two lanes outside the building. As a result, traffic backups in Brampton are legendary.

The Powerade Centre is home to The Garden Brothers Circus, rodeos, boxing, cultural events and family shows throughout the year.