The QMJHL Arena Guide - PEPS, Québec Remparts

PEPS, aka the Pavillon de l'éducation physique et des sports de l'Université Laval, or the Sports and Physical Education Pavillion at the University of Laval, is a university multi-sport building located on the campus of the Université Laval in Ste-Foy, Quebec, just a few miles from downtown Québec City. It's a sprawling, charmless, concrete building, one of those university edifices from the 1970s that blight nearly every campus around the world; one that makes you wonder why the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey should have been the dominant architectural cue of the decade. It's also set way back from the road, which means that in the height of winter you're forced to walk across a barren, windswept and frozen tundra just to get in.

When I visited in 2007, the Laval Rouge et Or varsity team was playing a home game, and I wasn't going to pay the admission fee when I had tickets to the Q game in Victoriaville in two hours. It took a mere eleven years for me to get back to PEPS, but I got to check out the inside in 2018 when I made the trip back to Quebec City. The building is quite unusual in that there is only seating on two sides - one end and one side have a good dozen rows of seats, angled steeply, two-man benches painted in the ubiquitous rouge et or. The other two sides of the building are walled in, with no seating at all, and a large UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL sign hanging over the ice. I had heard for years that PEPS could be modified for long track speed skating, but finally seeing the operation in action, one wishes that they hadn't bothered. The parts of the ice surface that "open" are only a dozen feet high or so, so if you actually went to PEPS for a long track skating competition, you would only be able to see half the ice from the grandstand anyway.

PEPS is a good idea, but it doesn't appear to work in practice. It is shocking that a QMJHL team played there for two full seasons, particularly when the Pavillon de la Jeunesse was available. At least the Remparts franchise is now healthy enough that it seems unlikely that PEPS would ever be used by the Q again, even in an emergency.