Blainville-Boisbriand Armada
Rink: Centre d’Excellence Sports Rosseau
Capacity: 3,100
Built: 2010
League: QMJHL
City: Boisbriand, Quebec
Home Of: Blainville-Boisbriand Armada
Games Attended: 2
First Game: February 7, 2020 vs Moncton
Most Recent Game: March 9, 2023 vs Shawinigan
Unique Arena: #50
QMJHL Arena: #6
The Centre d’Excellence Sports Rousseau isn’t just one of the newer rinks in the QMJHL, but it is a hub for all things local hockey. It’s one of those new rinks that is more a community centre than it is just home to a major tenant. It sits in the northern Montreal suburbs of Boisbriand, surrounded by townhouses, big box stores and large warehouses. People of all ages are wheeling in hockey bags even as a QMJHL tilt is set to get underway. Thanks to the hustle and bustle of non Q action, it has a decently sized free parking lot on site.
For such a new and modern facility this place is total bare bones. While the whole building has the impressive marquee and lobby out front, to get into this rink specifically you walk down a large corridor past concession stands before entering the rink through small doors at the end without any seating at ice level. You then walk up the aisle to get to the main concourse which runs around the top of the bowl. My first thoughts on seeing the rink itself were this is what an arena would look like if the rinks in Brampton and Plymouth had a baby.
The concourse for most of the bowl is pretty wide, except on the penalty box side which has all of the rink’s bathrooms as well as the press boxes and suites above. The far end and other side are fairly wide and totally open. There are only two very small concession stands in the concourse, mainly for drinks. If you want food, you need to get your hand stamped and go back out to the big concession stand before your ticket was scanned. The rink apparently only has 3,100 seats, and while it doesn’t feel big it doesn’t exactly feel that small either. The atmosphere was a tad better than I expected; the first time I showed up as the rink was about 70% full for the game I saw, plus a large supporting section for visiting Moncton who were all family and friends of a single Wildcats player from Quebec. However, my second game here had less than 1,000 people attend and was pretty much a total dud atmosphere-wise.
Being one of the newer rinks in the league, all the seats are your typical new plastic which are fine. However, there are zero ushers apart from the gentlemen scanning tickets as you enter, who wear referee shirts. Don’t expect an usher at the top of your section. Due to that people tend to wander in and out of seats sometimes during play, but not as often as you’d think. There is a small videoboard hanging on the wall at the non-seated end, which I actually thought was well used showing stats and league standings as well as your typical replays, but since my two games here they have installed a four-sided videoboard hanging above centre ice. I was surprised to see an in-arena host considering how simple the operation seems to be, but it didn’t feel like I was overwhelmed with ads.
I can’t say I was overly excited at the prospect of going to a game here, and the only reason I did a second game was due to being in the Montreal area already. The Q in Blainville-Boisbriand is their version of the OHL being in Brampton or Mississauga. It’s a convenient location in a hockey-mad metro area that just doesn’t seem to care about levels of hockey outside of the NHL club in town.
