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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
Where one organisation is responsible for several sports floors, the sensible approach is a programme rather than a series of separate decisions.
We start with a condition survey of every floor: construction, remaining wear layer, state of the finish and structure, markings, moisture, all photographed and recorded. That produces one document showing what the estate holds and what condition it is in, which very few organisations have.
From there the work is prioritised. Some floors need attention this year, some can wait three, some need nothing beyond maintenance. The programme then phases across budget years, taking each hall out of use at the quietest point in its own calendar rather than trying to do everything in one summer.
The advantages compound. Costs fall because mobilisation is spread and the sequence is efficient. Specification is consistent across every site. Documentation is standardised. And nobody is ever in the position of having six floors fail at once.
We work this way with academy trusts, local authorities, leisure operators and universities.
The real saving in looking after a sports floor is not in the refurbishment, it is in avoiding one.
A floor that receives a light screen and recoat every two to three years may never need another full sand. A floor left until the seal has worn through to bare timber will need a full refinish, and will have lost some of its remaining wear layer permanently in the meantime. Over the life of a building that difference is substantial.
A planned programme means scheduled visits rather than reactive calls: deep cleaning, screen and recoat when it is due, minor board repairs, remarking as lines wear, and an annual written condition inspection.
The inspection is the part clients tell us they value most, because it turns an unpredictable risk into a short report with a clear recommendation and a rough cost. That is something that can be put in front of a board or a governing body, and it is a great deal better than finding out in July that a hall will not open in September.
Almost every hall we work in has a stage, and it is usually in worse condition than the hall floor because of what gets dragged across it.
Stages are often a different construction and a different timber from the room they sit in, sometimes with a hollow void beneath for resonance. That changes how they are sanded and what they can take, and it is worth knowing before a machine goes on.
The finish is a different decision too. A matt or dead matt seal kills the reflections that stage lighting otherwise produces, and it hides the scuffing that scenery and staging leave. Some venues want a stage that can be painted for productions, which changes the specification again and needs discussing at the outset rather than afterwards.
We generally recommend doing the stage at the same time as the hall. It costs considerably less than two separate visits, it gives a consistent appearance, and the stage is usually the part that most needs it.
The greenest sports floor is almost always the one already in the building, and that is worth saying plainly when so many are replaced unnecessarily.
A timber sports floor that is refinished rather than replaced avoids the manufacture and transport of an entire new floor, and it avoids sending the existing one to landfill. Given that a well built sprung floor can be refinished five or six times across its life, the difference over thirty years is substantial.
The coatings have improved too. Modern water based two pack systems have far lower solvent content than the finishes used twenty years ago, which matters for the people applying them and for the building afterwards. Low emission systems are available where a specification calls for them, and we will discuss the trade offs honestly, because the toughest finishes are not always the lowest emission ones.
Where a floor genuinely has to be replaced, timber remains a renewable material and the old boards can often be recovered rather than skipped.
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.
Almost every hall we survey carries markings for at least one sport nobody has played in years, and a good many carry three or four.
Short tennis lines from a scheme that ended a decade ago. Five a side markings for a layout the school no longer uses. A junior court for a year group that is no longer taught. Every one of them adds visual noise and makes the sports you do play harder to read, particularly for a referee.
So relining starts with a conversation about what is actually used rather than what is currently painted. Taking two redundant sets off does more for clarity than any amount of clever colour selection, and it makes the job cheaper rather than dearer because there is less to put back.
On timber the reliable way to remove old line marking is to sand the floor, which takes it off completely. Where a full sand is not warranted we can often over seal instead. Either way, halls look considerably larger and considerably smarter once the clutter has gone.
It depends on what the floor actually needs. A deep clean is the least expensive intervention, a recoat sits in the middle, a full sand and seal above that, and replacement is the rare last resort. We survey free of charge and price every realistic option so you can choose on evidence.
All of it, plus the surrounding region. Everything is surveyed, agreed and priced before we set off, so there are no additional travel charges appearing partway through a project.
Yes. Overnight shifts, weekend blocks, phased sections and holiday programmes are all standard. We agree which sessions are affected before anything is booked out.
Compressed wood-composite blocks laid in a brick-like pattern, common in halls built from the 1950s to the 1980s. It cannot be sanded like timber and needs a specialist coating system instead.
We have, as far as Saudi Arabia. International projects are planned as complete programmes with everything agreed and priced in advance.
A typical hall takes one to two weeks from first machine to final coat, depending on size, how much board repair is needed and how many coats the seal requires. You get a day by day programme before we start.
Yes. We work as the specialist flooring element within refurbishment schemes and are used to main contractor site rules, inductions, permits and progress reporting.
Yes, and for multi site clients it usually should be. We build rolling programmes that spread the spend and take each hall out of use at the quietest point in its own calendar.
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.
Photographs of the room and of anything specific that worries you, approximate dimensions or the number of badminton courts, the age of the floor if known, and when the room could realistically be closed.
Regularly. We tender for frameworks, price on schedules of rates, and provide the full procurement documentation set including insurances, quality procedures and safeguarding arrangements.
Book a free survey of your floor in Isle of Wight 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.