Is All Sports Flooring the Same?

11 years ago

If you're choosing sports flooring for your commercial space, whether it's a school or church gymnasium or a sports club, there are lots of choices available. Is all sports flooring the same? Not at all. There are tremendous differences in price, maintenance, installation time, longevity, safety and performance depending on the type of indoor game court you select. Let's take a look at some of the factors that differentiate sports flooring.

Installation time - If you're running a professional gym, or managing a house of worship building project, you know that time is money. You don't want your facility closed for any longer than absolutely necessary, and you don't want delay the project because other work crews are waiting around for your sports floor to be installed and cure after installation until they can complete their jobs.

Most synthetic sports flooring material require about five days or more for installation, plus five days to cure. Wood floors take longer, and must be cured following installation. Sport Court sports flooring can be used immediately after installation, and may be used in as little as two to three days after lines are painted.

Maintenance - Installation is a one-time process. A difference of a few days can make the difference between a facility opening on time or not, but where time really matters to organizations is in downtime required for maintenance. Your students, gym members or congregation have become accustomed to having a gym at their disposal. Downtime is inconvenient and, in some cases, costly.

Every few years, wood gym floors must be sanded, re-coated and refinished, a process that can take as long as three weeks. Additionally, special cleaners are frequently required for wood gym floors. Poured-in-place floors also need a top-coat reapplied every few years.

Most Sport Court modular sports flooring, however, only needs basic cleaning to keep it free of dust, dirt and debris. Sport Court sports flooring can be cleaned with non-toxic chemicals, easily during off hours.

Longevity - In addition to easy regular maintenance, sports courts are easy to repair, which means you can prolong the life of your sports flooring. Damage to a wood floor means, again, shutting down the facility for weeks to buff, sand or mend the damage, with a new top coat applied. Similarly, rolled or sheet floors are not easy to fix, as the damaged piece must be replaced, resulting in unsightly seems.

Because Sport Courts sports flooring is modular, work crews can remove and replace any piece in minutes and simply repaint lines where necessary, resulting in less than three days of “downtime.”

Additionally, since Sport Court sports flooring tiles are one-piece, molded units that are the same throughout, there's no top coat to wear down, even in high-traffic areas.

Safety - The safety of sports flooring can be tested in a number of ways: abrasiveness, lateral movement, and traction. Sport Court sports flooring models have the lowest abrasiveness of any of our competitors and also when compared to wood floors. That means when players fall, there's less of a chance they will scrape themselves up.

Falls happen in sports. But on a sports court, they hurt less, so players will be back in the game faster and will play more often at your facility. Our floors are designed with generous horizontal and vertical movement for greater shock absorption, which means sports floors are safer on the knees, ankles and joints of players, especially young athletes whose bones and joints are still growing and developing. Finally, better traction means fewer falls. And what athletic director (or parent!) wouldn't want that?

Performance - Whether you're coaching future stars or training current athletes, you want a sports floor that will work with the players, that provides excellent ball response for any game, and where the performance won't change as the floor ages.

Sport Court sports flooring is recognized by athletes as high quality playing surfaces. Sport Court is the official surface of:

- the US Tennis Association

- US Soccer Foundation

- NCAA

- USA Volleyball

Want to read more about your options in sports flooring for your church, school or gym? Download our Sports Flooring Buyer's Guide here.