Grey Cup decorations starting to go up in Regina

Work is getting underway to get Regina ready for the Grey Cup festivities.

The big game is set for Nov. 20 at Mosaic Stadium, with the Grey Cup Festival to take place in the days leading up to the CFL’s championship.

Crystal Stus, the director of marketing and fan engagement with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, said that graphics have been going up across the city — on two of the Hill towers downtown, inside the Cornwall Centre, in the airport and in hotels.

A new Grey Cup Festival logo at the Regina airport. (Photo courtesy of the Saskatchewan Roughriders)

And more are on the way.

“Every few days, we have more going up. The city is working on our banner sites, which will go up along the Green Mile (on Albert Street). In respect of Remembrance Day, we have paused a few items. The Albert Street Memorial Bridge will have all the CFL flags go up as per usual,” Stus said.

“We have more digital boards this year, so if you’re driving down Albert or Lewvan, you would have seen a lot of the Grey Cup Festival branding over the past few weeks. The city is essentially going to be painted in all Grey Cup Festival. It is really going to come alive from the airport to downtown where people will be staying and then to the stadium.

“A few of the other things are just logistics and supply chain. We have a huge archway along 11th Avenue just off Lewvan on our west entrance so that will be going up next week. A lot of it is just logistics, so you’re going to start to see a lot.

“We’re using a number of different vendors here locally. We tried to source as much locally as we could, but we are shipping in a bunch of items from other provinces too as needed.”

Stus said the way the organizing committee is approaching decorating the city has changed since 2013 — the last time the Queen City hosted the Grey Cup — because of new technology that’s available now.

“We have 26 locations across the city, we have over 21 hotels, we have the shopping centre downtown, we have a lot of streetscapes, we have some window decaling and we’re working with the city to display a large digital mural on the corner of Albert and Victoria. There are a lot of new modern ways to display pageantry,” Stus said.

“People are used to seeing the brick-and-mortar signs and we have a digital installation. We probably have 60 to 70 per cent of the traditional mediums we had previously, but 2013 was a while ago so we pivoted our plan a little bit.”

Another change happening this year is that almost everything will be consolidated onto the REAL District.

“This year is different than 2013 because everything is under one footprint and all at one site. We’re going to have a 30-foot tube slide that will be completely branded and you’ll see it from far out of the Festival and we’ve got a lot of cool archways leading to the footprint at REAL so it is going to be exciting,” Stus said. “We’re the first host city to offer free shuttle service to the Festival.

“There’s a lot of cool things that will be activated. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”