Owners of the Ottawa Titans Baseball Club continue to look for a naming partner for the east-end stadium, likening the relationship to a marriage where there will be benefits but also compromise. In a recent interview with OBJ, Jacques Shore and Regan Katz said they’re considering companies big and small, including those from the city’s […]
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Owners of the Ottawa Titans Baseball Club continue to look for a naming partner for the east-end stadium, likening the relationship to a marriage where there will be benefits but also compromise.
In a recent interview with OBJ, Jacques Shore and Regan Katz said they’re considering companies big and small, including those from the city’s growing defence sector, as long as the partner aligns with the values of the baseball club and has a true community spirit.
Shore, a partner at Gowling WLG, president of the Ottawa Titans Field of Dreams Foundation and one of the team’s owners, said the team is bullish on finding the right partner by the end of the 2026 season.
“Our aim is by the end of this season to have the naming rights and be able to demonstrate this is who we have (as a partner) as we go into next year. By the end of the season, we’re hopeful to be in the playoffs. What a great opportunity to use that as a springboard because we’re going to get lots of attention. I have no doubt that we could get another (10,278) people into those seats,” Shore said, referring to the team’s home opener when it sold out the stadium for the first time in 24 years.
Becoming the naming rights partner for what is now known as Ottawa Stadium would have benefits, Shore added, such as visibility for the brand from the Queensway and Vanier Parkway.
The team has heard from multiple interested candidates, but is proceeding with caution.
“We’re quite happy to choose and make sure that it’s the right partner, somebody that understands the message, who appreciates the community and, more importantly, the family demographic that we're about,” said Katz, vice-president and chief operating officer of the Titans. “This isn’t the corporates of the world that are spending hundreds of dollars on a ticket to see a hockey game. That’s not our clientele. We want to be accessible to everyone.”
To date, interested parties haven’t aligned with the Titans’s values, have lacked a proven track record or didn’t have as direct a link to Ottawa as desired.
“We don’t want to find ourselves making this significant investment and then two years down the road we find that the (naming rights partner) company goes insolvent or is bought by another company,” Shore said.
“A sponsor is putting a sign on a building or in our outfield, but when we get into doing naming rights, that becomes a marriage. This is where the Titans and ‘blank’ are married together … We’re now completely intertwined and it’s truthfully going to be like a marriage. There’s going to be some negotiations. There’s going to be some compromises, but we’re going to do whatever we can to keep each other happy,” Katz said.
Katz pointed to the example of Slush Puppie and the Slush Puppie Centre in Gatineau, which is home to the Gatineau Olympiques of the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League.
“For them, that was about giving back to their community, but they truly wanted the team and the arena to succeed,” he said.
From JetForm to RCGT
Ottawans who were around in the early 1990s might remember JetForm Park, the first name for what is now Ottawa Stadium, at 300 Coventry Rd. First proposed in the late 1980s, the stadium was completed in April 1993, in time for the Ottawa Lynx’s opening season. The project came with a price tag of $17 million and was built to the specifications of the Lynx’s parent club, the Montreal Expos.
When JetForm rebranded as Accelio in the early 2000s, the stadium became known as Lynx Stadium.
The Lynx’s run in Ottawa came to an end after the 2007 season, when the organization — which by then was the Triple-A affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies — relocated to Pennsylvania. With the Lynx gone, the City of Ottawa started discussing plans to redevelop the site.
But shortly thereafter, a new team, the Ottawa Rapidz, was introduced as the city’s professional baseball team. The Rapidz’s time was short-lived as the team declared bankruptcy in 2009, despite attracting higher attendance numbers than the Lynx in its final days.
Once again without a team, the stadium was known as the Ottawa Baseball Stadium from 2008 to 2015. In 2010, the Intercountry Baseball League awarded a franchise to Ottawa, with the team, the Ottawa Fat Cats, playing out of the stadium. The Fat Cats also had a short run in Ottawa, playing from 2010 to 2012.
When the Can-Am League brought the Ottawa Champions to the nation’s capital in 2015, the stadium found itself with a new naming rights partner: Montreal-based accounting firm Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton, which signed a three-year deal.
After the 2019 season, the Champions ceased operations after the city terminated the team’s lease with the ballpark, and the naming rights partnership with RCGT ended along with it.
But in 2020, Sam Katz, Canadian businessman and former mayor of Winnipeg, along with the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group and Ottawa lawyer Shore, secured a 10-year lease with the city on the stadium and started a team that would join the Frontier League for the 2022 season. Since the Ottawa Titans Baseball Club was created in 2021, the team has been looking for a naming rights partner for the stadium.
“Baseball certainly had a rocky history in Ottawa and some people had doubts in the early years, which was another reason why we waited. But, here we are, five years later, absolutely thriving. I think we’re on a better footing,” said Regan Katz.
“We’re among the few (sport teams) who are increasing their attendance annually in Ottawa … We can only project that it’s going to continue to grow. The timing is right. The corporate world is coming back to life and people are embracing it all. It seems like the right time to get more aggressive and try to find the suitable partner.”
Not to mention, baseball has recently seen a boom in Ottawa and throughout the country, thanks in part to the Toronto Blue Jays making it to the World Series in 2025.
“Baseball has become so much more of interest to kids and school programs. It’s fantastic and we’ve added to it. The Blue Jays helped us, of course. But we have made that happen because of the way in which we have brought baseball back in a really sophisticated way to this city. It harkens back to the early days of the Lynx,” said Shore, partner at Gowling WLG, president of the Ottawa Titans Field of Dreams Foundation and one of the team’s owners.
When the Titans find a naming rights partner, Katz said he doesn’t want that company to slap its name on the building and call it a day.
“We can do anything. Knowing what their goals and targets are, it allows us to get creative and do things together to accomplish those goals and targets … We’ve got a great facility here, so maybe they believe in holding the provincial tournaments or city finals of baseball here. Maybe they really want to get into the grassroots (clubs) of the community. With them, we can make these things happen,” he said.
As the search continues, Katz said the team is continuing to reach out to the business community in Ottawa.
The right partner could be a local company, a regional company or a national or international company, as long as it has a presence in Ottawa, Shore said.
“The number of times we’ve done our research or have been speaking with (potential partners) and they’re quite comfortable with referencing Toronto or surrounding areas in the GTA. But I’m not confident that they could find Ottawa. They’re not the right partner,” Katz added.
And with Ottawa seeing a defence sector boom, Shore said the team is engaging the defence community.
“There are defence companies out there. They have a presence in Ottawa. Those kinds of companies work (as potential partners) if the outreach is a serious one,” Shore said.
“We’re not looking for a shortstop. We’re looking for a very successful batter,” he added. “It’s one of those things where there’s no question the benefits would accrue very quickly to any partner that we see because we would make the commitment to fully embrace them.”
Katz encouraged smaller companies to take a shot.
“I think there are many smaller companies out there that think that this is out of their reach and they’re wrong. It’s not about affordability here. This is something that (a smaller company) might actually be able to consider and play with the big boys. I’m hopeful that somebody will have the courage to reach out and … start that dialogue. Maybe we wouldn’t know to reach out because we didn’t think they’re ready but they may be,” Katz said. 
