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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Liverpool and across the UK. Much of our work involves multi-use halls where the sport is only part of what the room is asked to do.
A family business established in 1987, working exclusively on commercial indoor sports and timber floors. We survey, install, restore, mark, test and maintain, keeping every stage in our own hands so one warranty covers the whole system. Domestic work is handled separately by Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
In most buildings the sports hall is also the assembly space, the dining room, the exam venue and the events room. Specified purely as a sports floor, it will disappoint within two years, because the damage rarely comes from sport.
Chair legs, table trolleys, stacked staging and desks cause the indentation and scuffing we spend most of our repair time on. We account for that at specification stage, choosing finishes tough enough for furniture while still delivering the grip and shock absorption activity requires.
The cheapest floor protection available is a covering laid over the playing surface for non-sporting use. It takes the punishment from desks and chairs during exam season, protects against spillage at events, and lifts quickly afterwards.
The cost is a fraction of repairing the damage it prevents, yet it is routinely skipped. We advise on the right type for your surface and how to store and handle it so the covering itself does not cause marking.
Most floors we are called back to have been damaged by cleaning rather than use. Over-strength product, incorrect pH and hard water leave a residue that dulls the surface and reduces grip, and the usual response is to clean harder.
We demonstrate the correct routine to your own team, recommend products suited to the floor and the local water supply, and provide written guidance. It is the single cheapest thing any facility can do to extend the life of a finish.
At Medina Leisure Centre we refurbished the main sports hall floor completely: sanding, repairs, resealing and a full set of new markings, with the logistics planned down to the last detail so the centre lost as little bookable time as possible.
The after photographs show a hall transformed, and the programme finished on the date agreed at the outset.
~ 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
Markings are the part of a floor everybody looks at, and the part most often got wrong.
We set out from current governing body dimensions using laser and tape, not by copying what is already on the floor. Courts that have been remarked by tracing 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.
On timber the lines go down between coats of seal so the paint finishes under the final lacquer. That single detail is why our markings last as long as the finish, while lines applied on top of a completed floor start lifting within a season.
We will also ask what is actually played. Most halls carry markings for at least one sport nobody has taught in years, and removing redundant sets does more for clarity than any amount of clever colour choice. Fewer lines, correctly dimensioned, in colours that separate properly under your own lighting.
Every job is carried out by our own directly employed team using our own equipment. Nothing is passed to a chain of subcontractors, and that has practical consequences rather than being a slogan.
It means the people who survey your floor are connected to the people who work on it, so what was agreed is what happens. It means we control the programme rather than waiting on somebody else availability, which is why we can commit to a finish date and hold it. And it means the standard is consistent, because it is the same team on the last day as the first.
It also matters for the specialist work. Granwood restoration, parquet, sprung floor repairs and pendulum testing are not things you can subcontract to a general flooring firm and expect a good result. They are learned over years.
Courtship Flooring has been doing this since 1987, and a good deal of the team has been with the company for a very long time. That continuity is the reason we can look at a floor and know what is under it.
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.
University sports facilities have a particular problem: they are busy year round, so the long summer shutdown that schools rely on does not exist.
Term brings curriculum use, club training and league fixtures. The summer brings conferences, summer schools and external hire, which is often more lucrative than term time use. The window for work is therefore narrow, defined and non negotiable.
The way we handle it is by planning to the window rather than hoping to fit inside it. We survey early, order materials in advance, staff the job properly rather than spreading a team across sites, and build the cure times into the programme rather than treating them as slack.
Campus estates usually hold several floors of different ages: a main sports hall, studios, squash courts and a fitness suite, often built decades apart. A condition survey across all of them, with a phased programme, is generally far more useful than dealing with each as it becomes urgent.
Liverpool gives us a wide mix, with university sport, academy trust estates, city leisure facilities and a considerable amount of older building stock.
University and college facilities are busy across the full year, with summer conference and external use filling what would otherwise be a shutdown. The windows are narrow and fixed, and those projects are planned well ahead and staffed to complete inside them.
Academy and school halls are the largest group by number. Many date from the nineteen sixties and seventies with sprung timber floors that are structurally sound but overdue a refinish. Those are almost always better restored than replaced, and a proper survey usually finds considerably more life left than the school has been told.
Leisure centres and community sports facilities follow, where keeping the building trading means overnight working.
Granwood appears regularly in the older school and church halls here. It needs a specialist approach rather than timber sanding, and most of the Granwood floors we are asked to look at are worth saving.
Liverpool has a wide spread of building ages, so two projects usually cover the ground.
For older school and church halls, St George School in Ascot is the important one. That hall had a Granwood floor condemned by others as beyond saving. Granwood is a composite block in a bitumen bed, not timber, and it needs specialist preparation and a modified epoxy coating rather than sanding and lacquering. We rebedded, replaced the broken blocks and coated it properly. The floor has years left at a fraction of replacement cost.
For academy halls, Harris Academy is the closer comparison: constant curriculum use, a finish long overdue, a fixed term date, and markings reset from measured dimensions with redundant sports removed.
For university facilities, Aston University is the parallel, where the difficulty was a year round timetable with no genuine summer shutdown.
When we reline a hall we set the court markings out to the dimensions the governing bodies actually publish, which is not always what is currently painted on the floor.
A netball court is 30.5 by 15.25 metres in three equal thirds, with 50 millimetre lines, and because the lines count as part of the area they enclose, marking them thin genuinely changes the game. A basketball court is 28 by 15 metres with the three point arc at 6.75 metres, and the restricted area is now a rectangle rather than the trapezoid still found in many older halls. Badminton is 13.4 by 6.1 metres for doubles, with the short service line 1.98 metres from the net.
Those figures matter because players move between venues. A court marked slightly out plays differently from every other court the same team uses, and nobody can ever quite say why. Relining from measured dimensions rather than tracing the old lines is what corrects it.
Where a hall is genuinely too small for a full size court, we scale it properly or mark a junior format rather than compressing a senior layout into a space that cannot hold it safely.
Cost is driven by area, condition and specification. Because we do not subcontract, there is no margin stacked on top of another contractor’s price, which is one reason our quotations tend to compare well. Everything is itemised so you can see exactly what you are paying for.
Yes, and we regularly work considerably further afield. Our quotations include travel and mobilisation openly rather than adding them later, so the figure you see is the figure you pay.
Yes, when the right system is specified. Sports vinyl and polyurethane are made to meet BS EN 14904 for shock absorption, ball bounce and friction, and are widely used in leisure centres and schools.
Machine cleaning with appropriate solutions to lift embedded residue and grime that normal mopping leaves behind, restoring appearance and grip. It starts from four pounds fifty per square metre.
Yes, using the pendulum method to BS 7976-2 with a written report recording values across multiple positions. It either reassures you or gives you documented evidence that the floor needs attention.
Yes, and we recommend doing both together. Stages are usually in worse condition than the hall floor, and one visit costs considerably less than two while giving a consistent finish.
Heating dries the air, the boards give up moisture and shrink. It is normal seasonal movement rather than a fault, and it closes again in summer. Keeping the building humidity more stable reduces it.
Light foot traffic is normally possible around twenty four hours after the final coat, and full use with equipment back at seventy two hours. We confirm exact times for the system used, because they vary.
It can if it is run too hot or brought up too quickly, which dries the boards and opens gaps. The system needs proper commissioning and controlled surface temperatures, and the timber needs to be specified as suitable.
Yes. Scheduled deep cleaning, screen and recoat visits, minor repairs, remarking and an annual written condition inspection. It is considerably cheaper than reacting when a floor has already failed.
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.
Book a free survey of your floor in Liverpool 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.