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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in the Isle of Wight and across the UK. We have refurbished sports hall floors on the Island and plan work here with the crossing built into the programme.
We have been specialising in indoor sports and commercial timber floors since 1987. The business is family-run, nothing is subcontracted, and the crew who survey a building are the crew who work on it. Domestic and residential projects fall outside what we do and are looked after by 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
Island logistics are a planning exercise rather than an obstacle. Machinery, materials and crew all have to arrive together, and a forgotten item cannot be collected in an hour.
We plan the full material schedule before travelling, bring contingency stock, and programme the work as a continuous block rather than a series of visits. Ferry costs are included in the quotation up front rather than added later.
Because a return visit is expensive, everything happens in one window: survey findings acted upon, repairs completed, sanding, sealing, marking and any testing, with the handover date agreed before we set off.
It concentrates disruption into a single period rather than spreading it, which most facilities prefer in any case.
Buildings close to the sea experience higher and more variable humidity, which affects how timber behaves and how finishes cure. A specification that performs perfectly inland can fail early in that environment.
We take moisture and humidity readings as part of survey and choose seal systems and expansion allowances accordingly. It is a small adjustment at specification stage that determines whether a floor lasts its full life.
Harris Academy wanted a sports floor to match its ambitions, so we fitted a complete Junckers solid-beech sports system, the same Danish flooring specified in elite competition venues, finished with full multi-sport line markings.
An installation like that is a long-term statement: properly maintained, it will outlast every pupil currently on the roll. The project ran to programme from bare sub-floor to handover.
~ 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
On the Isle of Wight the enemy of a sports floor arrives on the soles of trainers. Beach sand and car park grit are hard, sharp and abrasive, and under thousands of footfalls a week they cut through a seal in the route from the door to the courts long before the rest of the hall shows wear.
Most halls have a doormat where they need a system. Several paces of barrier matting at every entrance, including the door from the changing rooms, removes most of the grit before it reaches the timber. The matting has to be cleaned often enough to keep working, because a full mat simply passes the dirt on.
Inside the hall a daily dry mop finishes the job.
We look at the entrances during every survey. The wear pattern on the floor almost always maps to the doors, and the fix is cheaper than any refinishing.
Schools and leisure operators on the Isle of Wight regularly ask whether a tired timber floor should be replaced with vinyl or polyurethane, and the answer depends on what the room does.
Timber remains the best surface for ball sports. An area elastic sprung floor spreads the load across a wide zone, which protects joints and gives a consistent bounce, and it can be sanded and resealed several times across a life of many decades.
Sports vinyl and cast polyurethane are point elastic, giving only where the foot lands. They come into their own in multi purpose rooms, studios and halls with heavy trolley traffic, wet shoes or catering, where timber would be punished. They take colour and zoning well and need a periodic deep clean and recoat.
Where a sound timber floor exists, refinishing it costs a small fraction of any replacement and usually gives the better floor.
Two very different jobs get described as refurbishing a floor, and the price gap between them is wide.
A screen and recoat keys the existing seal with a fine abrasive and applies a fresh coat of two pack polyurethane on top. It takes a few days, removes no timber, and restores grip and appearance when the finish is dull or scratched but still intact. Done every two to three years it keeps a hall looking well indefinitely.
A full sand strips the floor to bare wood, allows board repairs and fresh setting out, and rebuilds the finish from the first coat. It is the right job when the seal has worn through in the traffic lanes, when stains have reached the timber or when courts need moving. It should be needed roughly every ten years.
Island halls often arrive at us overdue. We say which job you need, not which one is bigger.
A sports hall floor is full of holes on purpose. Netball post sockets, badminton upright sockets, volleyball fittings, floor boxes for power and the anchor points for cricket nets all sit in the timber, and each one is a place where a floor can fail.
Sockets loosen as the timber moves with the seasons, covers sit proud and become trip hazards, and a socket left open during sanding fills with dust and never closes cleanly again. Salt air on the Isle of Wight is hard on the metal too.
We survey every fitting, protect each one during the work and reset any that have moved. Where new setting out relocates a court, the old sockets are capped flush and new ones cut and bedded to the correct depth. Redundant fittings are removed and the board made good.
Getting this right is a small part of the job that decides whether the hall feels finished.
Island work has a particular logistical shape, and we plan it accordingly rather than treating it as a mainland job with a ferry attached.
Everything travels with the team: machinery, abrasives, coatings and spares, in greater quantity than we would carry to a job an hour from base, because a missing item cannot be collected the same day. The programme is worked out completely in advance, which in practice makes island projects more tightly planned than local ones.
We know the island well. The refinish at Medina Leisure Centre is one of the projects we point to most often, and it is a fair illustration of the type: a heavily booked sports hall, an operator who could not afford a long closure, and a programme built around the centre timetable with dust control managed so the rest of the building stayed usable.
School sports halls and community buildings make up the rest of the work here, with the usual fixed term dates and committee budgets respectively.
Where more than one facility is considering work, sequencing them into one visit is well worth doing.
Medina Leisure Centre is our best known island project and it answers most of the questions we get asked here.
The sports hall needed a full refinish. The centre could not afford to lose the booking income, and the surrounding facilities had to keep running throughout. So the work was programmed around the centre timetable rather than the other way round, with early starts and late finishes, and the noisiest operations sequenced for when the rest of the building was quietest. Each coat got the cure time it needed without the hall standing idle longer than necessary.
Dust control mattered more than on a school site, because a leisure building shares air handling between spaces and members notice immediately. Sealed extraction on every machine and proper screening of the working area kept the rest of the facility usable.
The hall came back with a restored surface, correct slip resistance and fresh markings. For an operator the real measure is how few complaints reach the desk while it is going on.
Every job we complete on the Isle of Wight comes with a written guarantee covering the workmanship and the materials, and the terms sit on the quotation rather than in a document you have to ask for.
If a seal lifts, a repair fails or a line peels through a fault of ours, we come back across the water and put it right. That is the whole point of a guarantee and it is not something we argue about.
What we are careful to explain in advance is what sits outside it. A floor sealed over a base we said was too wet, a hall cleaned with polish against our written guidance, or damage from a roof leak are not workmanship failures. If a repair may not match perfectly or a stain may not fully lift, you hear that at survey.
We have traded since 1987 because people call us back.
Light foot traffic in clean soft shoes after twenty four hours. Leave it seventy two hours or more before equipment, mats, trampolines and staging return, because the seal is still hardening beneath the surface. We agree the reopening date before we cross and sign the room until then.
Yes. We carry out pendulum slip resistance testing at several positions across the floor and issue a certificate recording the values. It is the evidence insurers, governing bodies and audit inspectors expect, and it can be done as a standalone visit or at the end of a refurbishment.
Risk assessments and method statements written for your building, COSHH sheets for every product, our public and employers liability certificates and DBS details for each operative attending. Our teams sign in, wear identification and keep to the areas your site manager agrees.
Yes. A dead patch means the resilient layer or a batten beneath that area has failed, and no surface work will change how it feels. We lift the boards over the patch, replace the failed pads or battens, relay the timber and refinish, leaving the rest of the floor untouched.
Always. We measure from a datum using the current dimensions, such as 30.5 by 15.25 metres for netball and 28 by 15 metres for basketball with a 6.75 metre arc, then square the layout with diagonals before painting. Old lines are never traced, because they are often wrong.
Usually. Granwood is a composite block of wood flour and cement in a bitumen bed and must not be sanded like timber. We rebed loose blocks, prepare the surface with the right abrasives and coat it with a modified epoxy system. Older bitumen is tested for asbestos first.
Yes. Exam desks, stacking chairs and staging cause most of the scoring we later sand out of school halls. A purpose made roll out covering laid before the furniture arrives takes that damage instead of the seal, and we advise on the right product and how to handle it.
Satin, in almost every case. A satin two pack polyurethane hides scuffs and rubber marks, keeps its slip resistance under heavy use and avoids the glare that gloss throws back from LED lighting. Gloss looks striking on handover day and shows every mark within a few weeks.
Book a free survey of your sports hall on the Isle of Wight. We will come across, take the readings, and give you a written report, a fixed price with the crossing included and a firm programme. Call 01823 674562 or send us a message.