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Thursday, September 24, 2026
Wenger Corporation Launches GearBoss Sports Rigging for Sports and Entertainment Venues
Lighting&Sound America Online - News: Wenger Corporation has announced the launch of GearBoss Sports Rigging, expanding the company's capabilities to provide engineered rigging solutions for sports and entertainment venues across North America.
Being from the west coast and not heavily involved in rigging, particularly touring and professional, I don't know much about JR Clancy or the Wenger Corp (we have Stagecraft Industries locally in the PNW does almost all theater instillations), but I have heard of JR Clancy mentioned as a major name in the Broadway & East Coast industry. I will be honest, I am a bit surprised that they hadn't been in the arena rigging area earlier, as that seems to be a major part of the rigging industry as a whole. I would definitely be interested in learning more about some of the technologies they talked about in the article, including arena sub-grids and wire tension grid systems in arenas. Given what JR Clancy has a reputation for, I have hope they will make major progress in the industry and push it further into the future.
While I don’t have any significant understanding of how the sports industry has addressed its rigging needs in the past, this makes total sense to me. With the rigging world of theatre always having close ties to the non-theatre aspect of live entertainment such as concerts and conventions, there has always been a need for riggers who know how to work in venues that don’t fit the typical fly-house or grid based rigging situations theatres often have, and I can’t imagine the challenges that a structure as large as a football stadium might present, and have no doubt that this will be a very lucrative venture for Wenger.
I feel like thinking of sports rigging being a really complicated industry is not super common, but in reality, the sheer quantity of entertainment events bundled into a sports event these days definitely adds an increased level of difficulty in the rigging. Additionally, camera setups have become so intricate and complex that it really does require top notch rigging, and that there’s definitely a market for people whose entire niche is rigging for sports events. Adding onto the complexity of the system itself, the rigging also becomes interesting in these arenas and interesting spaces. While I sometimes have mixed feeling about J.R. Clancy/Wenger owning so much of the rigging industry, I imagine that this offshoot company will have a lot of success with finding a niche and developing this subsection of the rigging industry that is sports rigging. I think that creating that space will result in a lot of interesting technological advances in rigging for this specific market, which is exciting.
3 comments:
Being from the west coast and not heavily involved in rigging, particularly touring and professional, I don't know much about JR Clancy or the Wenger Corp (we have Stagecraft Industries locally in the PNW does almost all theater instillations), but I have heard of JR Clancy mentioned as a major name in the Broadway & East Coast industry. I will be honest, I am a bit surprised that they hadn't been in the arena rigging area earlier, as that seems to be a major part of the rigging industry as a whole. I would definitely be interested in learning more about some of the technologies they talked about in the article, including arena sub-grids and wire tension grid systems in arenas. Given what JR Clancy has a reputation for, I have hope they will make major progress in the industry and push it further into the future.
While I don’t have any significant understanding of how the sports industry has addressed its rigging needs in the past, this makes total sense to me. With the rigging world of theatre always having close ties to the non-theatre aspect of live entertainment such as concerts and conventions, there has always been a need for riggers who know how to work in venues that don’t fit the typical fly-house or grid based rigging situations theatres often have, and I can’t imagine the challenges that a structure as large as a football stadium might present, and have no doubt that this will be a very lucrative venture for Wenger.
I feel like thinking of sports rigging being a really complicated industry is not super common, but in reality, the sheer quantity of entertainment events bundled into a sports event these days definitely adds an increased level of difficulty in the rigging. Additionally, camera setups have become so intricate and complex that it really does require top notch rigging, and that there’s definitely a market for people whose entire niche is rigging for sports events. Adding onto the complexity of the system itself, the rigging also becomes interesting in these arenas and interesting spaces. While I sometimes have mixed feeling about J.R. Clancy/Wenger owning so much of the rigging industry, I imagine that this offshoot company will have a lot of success with finding a niche and developing this subsection of the rigging industry that is sports rigging. I think that creating that space will result in a lot of interesting technological advances in rigging for this specific market, which is exciting.
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