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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Greater Manchester and across the UK. A high concentration of universities, leisure trusts and clubs makes this a region where performance standards matter.
Nearly four decades of specialist work sits behind every project: installation, refurbishment, sanding and sealing, court marking, slip testing and planned maintenance, all delivered in-house. Our clients are institutions and operators rather than households, and private homes are handled by Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
Shock absorption is the proportion of impact energy the floor takes rather than the player. Landings, sprints and stops all generate force that has to go somewhere, and a compliant floor absorbs a meaningful share before it reaches ankles, knees and hips.
BS EN 14904 defines how it is measured and what indoor sports floors should achieve. It matters most for the youngest and oldest users, who are least able to absorb that load themselves.
Floors deflect in different ways. An area-elastic system spreads deflection across a wide zone, which is what a basketball player experiences as a consistent, forgiving surface. A point-elastic system deflects locally beneath the foot, typical of synthetic constructions.
Combined and mixed-elastic systems attempt to capture both. Which is right depends on the sports involved and the level of play, and we will explain the practical difference rather than the marketing one.
Specification is a promise; testing is evidence. On completion we can arrange performance testing against BS EN 14904 alongside pendulum slip testing to BS 7976-2, producing documentation you can hold on file.
For facilities hosting competitive fixtures or answering to a governing body, that paperwork converts an awkward enquiry into a straightforward one.
The main sports hall at Liskeard Leisure Centre had taken years of public sessions, club blocks and league nights. We delivered a complete programme of sanding, re-lining and resealing, returning the hall to service looking like a new installation.
It is a fair illustration of how we handle leisure work: one tight programme, agreed dates, and a centre back in action on schedule.
~ 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
A new finish is only as good as the regime that follows it, and the fastest way to waste the money is to put the wrong mop on it in week one.
The guidance we hand over is deliberately short. Dust mop daily with a treated cloth to lift grit before it acts as an abrasive underfoot. Damp mop with a neutral cleaner made for sealed sports timber. Deal with spills quickly. Keep a decent mat run at the entrances, because most of the grit that wears a floor walks in on trainers.
What to avoid is equally short. No polish, no wax, nothing that promises shine. These build up, reduce slip resistance and eventually have to be stripped chemically at real cost. They are the most common cause of the slippery floors we are called out to.
Scrubber driers are fine if they are set up correctly and the water is picked up rather than left standing. We are happy to look at your machine settings while we are on site.
Most enquiries reach us as a description of a symptom, and there are a few things that let us give a genuinely useful reply rather than a holding one.
Photographs are the most valuable. Two or three of the whole room, and two or three close up of whatever is worrying you, tell us more than several paragraphs. If there is a worn patch, a stain, a lifting board or a dead spot, photograph that specifically.
Approximate dimensions, or just the number of badminton courts, gives us the area. The rough age of the floor and whether anybody knows what is underneath helps. If you have any record of previous work, even a decade old invoice, that is genuinely useful.
Then tell us what the room is used for and when it could realistically be closed. Those two facts shape the recommendation as much as the condition does.
From that we can usually give an informed steer and a budget range before arranging a survey.
Underfloor heating and timber sports floors can work together, but the combination has to be designed rather than assumed, and we see the consequences when it is not.
Timber moves with moisture content, and heating from below drives moisture out of the boards. If the system is run too hot, or brought up too quickly at the start of a season, boards shrink, gaps open and in extreme cases the floor cups or splits. None of that is repairable by refinishing.
The requirements are straightforward. Surface temperature has to be limited and controlled, the system needs commissioning and gradual warming rather than being switched on in October at full output, and the timber needs to be specified as suitable for use over heating.
Where we are installing over an existing system we will ask for the commissioning records and the operating parameters. Where we are refinishing a floor that has suffered from a badly run system, we will tell you that the finish is the symptom rather than the problem.
We have been trading since 1987, and the reason a firm lasts that long in this trade is that people call it back rather than calling somebody else.
Our work is guaranteed, and if something is not right we come back and put it right. That sounds like the least anybody should offer, and in this industry it is not as universal as it should be.
What we will not do is guarantee against things outside our control. A floor sealed over a slab we advised was too wet, a hall where the cleaning regime uses polish despite the guidance, or damage from a leak in the building are not workmanship issues, and we will explain the distinction at the time rather than in the small print.
Equally, we will tell you before we start when we think a job carries risk. If a floor is marginal, if a repair may not match perfectly, or if a stain may not fully come out, you will hear it at survey. Managing expectations honestly is a large part of why this works.
Greater Manchester gives us one of the widest ranges of building stock we work in, from Victorian school halls to modern university sports centres.
University and college sport is a significant part of it, with the year round pressure on the timetable that every campus has. Summer conference and external use fills what would otherwise be a shutdown, so the working windows are narrow, fixed and planned well ahead.
Academy and school halls are the largest group by number. A great many are from the nineteen sixties and seventies with sprung timber floors that are structurally sound but have gone too long between refinishes. Those are usually excellent restoration candidates, and a survey often finds far more life left than the school expects.
Leisure centres and community sports facilities follow, where the priority is keeping the doors open and most work happens overnight.
Granwood turns up regularly in the older halls, and it needs a specialist approach rather than timber sanding. We have restored Granwood floors that others had written off entirely.
The building stock here spans well over a century, and the problems reflect that range.
In the Victorian and Edwardian school halls, the recurring find is a floor that has been coated repeatedly without ever being taken back. Those layers eventually go cloudy, peel at the edges and lift in sheets, and the answer is to strip properly rather than add another coat.
In the post war stock, dead spots are the common complaint. A sprung floor that has lost its response in patches has a failed pad or batten underneath, and refinishing the surface will not change how it feels. We lift the boards locally and replace the components.
Granwood appears regularly across the region and is frequently condemned when it should not be. It needs specialist preparation and a modified epoxy coating rather than timber sanding, and restoration costs a fraction of replacement.
Modern facilities mostly want catching on a maintenance cycle rather than rescuing.
A good proportion of the relining we do is because a hall is being asked to do something different from what it was marked for.
Pickleball is the obvious recent example. It shares its footprint with badminton, so adding it is usually a matter of the kitchen lines and a centre service line rather than a whole new court. Walking netball, short mat bowls and indoor cricket all turn up for the same reason: a facility has picked up a new user group and the floor has not caught up.
The temptation is to add the new sport on top of everything already there. In a hall that already carries five sets of markings that makes the floor genuinely hard to use, so we would rather look at the whole scheme and take something off at the same time.
We will ask what is actually played now, in what proportion, and set out a hierarchy where the sport used most gets the clearest colour and the most visual weight. Fewer lines, correctly dimensioned, beats more lines every time.
Three things drive the figure: hall size, the amount of preparation the existing surface needs, and whether the sub-floor requires attention. All three are established at survey, after which the quotation is fixed. We do not price from a distance and then revise once work starts.
We cover the entire area and beyond. Our projects have taken us across the UK and internationally, and the planning method is the same wherever the building happens to be.
Protective covering laid over the playing surface takes the punishment from desk and chair legs and lifts quickly afterwards. It costs far less than repairing the damage.
Regularly. Original timber is restored rather than replaced wherever it is sound, interventions stay sympathetic, and we can advise on what conservation officers typically accept.
We coordinate floor sockets, net post positions and equipment interfaces as part of installation and marking, so the finished floor works with the equipment you actually use.
Dust mop daily to lift grit, damp mop with a neutral cleaner made for sealed sports timber, and never use polish, wax or anything promising shine. We hand over written guidance with every job.
Yes. We work as the specialist flooring element within refurbishment schemes and are used to main contractor site rules, inductions, permits and progress reporting.
Constantly. Summer holidays and half terms are when most of our school work happens, and summer slots book up early. If you are planning for next year it is worth speaking to us in January rather than June.
Regularly. We tender for frameworks, price on schedules of rates, and provide the full procurement documentation set including insurances, quality procedures and safeguarding arrangements.
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.
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.
Book a free survey of your floor in Greater Manchester 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.