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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Ayrshire and across the UK. We work with schools, community facilities and clubs across the region, planning each project as a single visit.
Trading since 1987 and family-owned throughout, we handle indoor sports and commercial timber floors from first survey to long-term aftercare, with our own crew and equipment on site at every stage. Domestic and residential projects are the province of our sister company, Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
In many towns a single hall is the sports centre, the theatre and the function room, and it is expected to perform all three roles on a budget that leaves no room for waste.
We specify for the actual pattern of use rather than for sport alone, recommend protective covering for events, and are explicit about the compromise involved rather than overselling a surface that excels at everything.
Where a building is run by volunteers rather than a facilities team, the daily routine determines the life of a finish more than any specification decision. Over-strength cleaning product applied with the best intentions is the usual culprit.
We provide a simple written routine, recommend suitable products and demonstrate the method to whoever maintains the hall. It takes an hour and regularly adds years.
Buildings near the coast experience higher and more variable humidity, which affects how timber moves and how finishes cure. A specification that performs well inland can fail early in that environment.
We take moisture and humidity readings at survey and set expansion allowances and seal choice accordingly. It is a small adjustment that decides whether a floor reaches its expected life.
Not every floor we save sits in a sports centre. St Katherine’s had the kind of well-loved, well-worn hall floor that carries badminton one evening and a community event the next, and the committee wanted it rescued rather than replaced.
We restored it completely. The hall is now set for another few decades of everything it is asked to do.
~ Matthew Evans
An outstanding company to deal with and they couldn’t have been better to work with. St George’s Ascot now has a stunning new sports hall floor and we are delighted. From quote, support, delivery and after sales, the Team has been brilliant. Thank you. 
~ James Anderson
Sanding makes dust. The question is whether it stays in the room or ends up through the building, and that is a matter of equipment and preparation rather than luck.
Our machines run on sealed vacuum extraction rather than bag systems, which captures the great majority of it at source. We screen the working area, and we agree with your site team which doors, vents and air handling routes need isolating before we start. In buildings with shared ventilation, particularly leisure centres with a pool hall, that conversation matters.
Edges and corners are the point at which dust escapes on a badly run job, because hand machines are harder to extract from. We use extracted edge equipment for the same reason we use it everywhere else.
The room we are working in will be dusty. The rest of the building should not be, and if it is then something has been done wrong. We would rather set the expectation clearly than have you discover it.
Gym floors fail differently from every other floor in a building, because the damage is point loading rather than even wear.
Dropped dumbbells, plate loaded machines dragged rather than lifted, benches shuffled across boards and racks bolted down and later moved all leave dents and gouges. Sanding removes a surface but a deep dent stays a dent, and part of our survey is telling you which marks will come out and which will not.
Chalk and sweat are the other half. Both soak into timber wherever the seal has worn through, and chalk in open grain can leave a permanent grey cast in the lifting area.
Rubber matting laid straight onto a sealed floor and left down for years traps moisture and can bond to the lacquer, so lifting it takes the finish with it. It is one of the main reasons gym floors arrive in worse condition than the sports hall next door.
The answer is usually a harder finish, an extra coat in the free weight zone, and a proper lifting platform where the weights actually land.
The complaints that bring people to us are usually about how a floor feels rather than how it looks, and feel comes from the structure.
A hall with dead spots, where a section feels lifeless underfoot, has almost always lost resilience below the boards. A pad has compressed, a batten has cracked, or a cradle has failed. The fix is local: we lift the boards over the affected area, replace the failed components and relay. The rest of the floor is untouched.
Squeaks and movement generally mean loose fixings or battens that have shifted, and again the repair is targeted rather than wholesale.
What matters is that these are structural problems and sanding does nothing for them. A floor refinished without addressing a failed subfloor looks superb and still feels wrong, and the money is largely wasted. We check underneath at survey for exactly that reason, and we will tell you when a floor needs structural work before it needs a new finish.
Timber remains the benchmark for indoor sports flooring, and the reason is simple: it performs well, it can be refinished repeatedly rather than replaced, and players prefer it.
The systems divide by what sits beneath the boards. A sprung floor uses resilient pads, foam blocks or engineered cradles under battens, producing an area elastic response that spreads load when a player lands. A semi sprung system uses a shallower build up. A floor fixed directly to the slab has no give at all and is hard on joints where sport is played regularly.
Above that, the playing surface is solid strip or engineered board. Maple is the traditional choice for its hardness and pale colour, with beech and oak also common. Solid strip has a generous wear layer and will take many refinishes. Engineered board has a thinner layer over a stable core, so there is less margin.
The detail that governs longevity is the perimeter. Timber moves with humidity, and a floor without a proper expansion gap and ventilated skirting will lift in the middle. It is skipped surprisingly often.
Ayrshire brings us a mix of council leisure facilities, secondary school sports halls and a good number of community and club buildings, and the flooring issues differ noticeably between them.
The leisure centre halls tend to be the busiest and the best maintained, and what they usually need is a screen and recoat on a sensible cycle rather than a full refinish. Catching those before the seal wears through is what keeps them off the replacement list.
School halls are more often overdue. A hall running a full curriculum plus community lettings takes a great deal of traffic, and where the last refinish was more than a decade ago the finish has usually gone in the traffic lanes and the markings are tired.
Club and community buildings are the third group, and they are often the most rewarding. Old timber floors with plenty of depth left, decades of accumulated polish, and chair and table scoring across the whole area. Those transform completely for a modest sum.
We work across all three, and because we travel to the area we will usually try to sequence several jobs together, which brings the cost down for everybody involved.
Facilities in Ayrshire often ask what comparable work looks like, and two of our projects usually answer the question.
Medina Leisure Centre is the closest parallel for a council or operator run sports hall. The centre could not afford a fortnight of lost bookings, so the work was programmed around its own timetable, sealed at the end of shifts, with dust extraction and screening arranged so the rest of the building carried on. For an operator the measure of a job like that is how few complaints reach the front desk while it is running.
For school halls, Hornbury Academy in Wakefield is the better comparison: a hall in constant curriculum use, a finish that had gone well past its proper cycle, and a fixed date to be back for the first day of term.
Neither was complicated technically. Both were won on surveying properly beforehand so nothing unexpected appeared once the old finish came off.
The most common mistake in court relining is tracing what is already on the floor. It repeats old errors and it keeps sports on the hall that nobody plays any more.
We set out from current governing body dimensions using laser and tape, not from the existing paint. Courts that have been remarked by copying the previous set drift over the years, and a surprising number of halls turn out to have netball thirds that are not equal or three point arcs that are not true. If your courts have always felt slightly wrong, that is usually why.
Every dimension is checked before a drop of paint goes down, and the two ends of a court are compared so the layout is symmetrical rather than merely plausible.
On timber the lines go on between coats of seal, which puts the paint under the final lacquer where trainers, trolleys and scrubber driers cannot reach it. That single detail is the difference between line marking that lasts the life of the finish and line marking that starts lifting within a season.
Size, condition and specification set the price. We survey free of charge, take moisture readings and measure remaining board depth, then quote a fixed sum with the scope itemised. If a cheaper approach will genuinely work, that is what we will recommend.
The whole area and its neighbouring counties. We have worked the length of the UK since 1987, and remote projects are simply planned more thoroughly rather than priced at a premium.
The European standard for indoor sports surfaces. It sets out how shock absorption, vertical deformation, ball bounce and friction are measured, and what an indoor sports floor should achieve.
We can give indicative guidance from photographs and hall dimensions, which is often enough to plan a budget. A firm fixed price needs a site survey, which is free.
Solid and engineered timber from Junckers, Boen and Havwoods, plus vinyl, polyurethane and lino, and specialist coating systems for Granwood and composite block floors.
Sealed vacuum extraction on all machines including edge equipment, screening of the working area, and agreement with your site team on isolating doors and air handling routes.
Satin or matt in almost every case. Gloss looks impressive at handover and shows every scuff within weeks, as well as producing noticeable glare under modern lighting.
No. Every job is carried out by our own directly employed team using our own machinery. It is why we can commit to a finish date and why the standard is the same on the last day as the first.
Usually a two pack polyurethane in a satin sheen. It holds slip resistance and appearance under heavy use, and satin hides scuffing and avoids glare under the LED lighting most halls now have.
Yes, routinely. A great deal of our leisure centre and university work is done overnight so the facility keeps trading. It costs a little more in labour and usually saves a great deal more in lost income.
Yes, in advance and specific to the job rather than a generic template. We also supply COSHH sheets for every product, insurance certificates and DBS details for staff on school sites.
Book a free survey of your floor in Ayrshire and we will tell you honestly what it needs, what it will cost and how quickly it can happen. Call 01823 674562 or send us a message.