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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in South Yorkshire and across the UK. Our work here spans competitive venues, school estates and community facilities.
This is all we do, and we have been doing it since 1987. Installation, restoration, sanding, sealing, line marking, slip testing and maintenance for commercial and institutional buildings, delivered without subcontractors. Residential projects go to 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
Hosting fixtures raises the bar. Court dimensions must match the current governing body specification, run-off has to be adequate and unobstructed, the surface has to perform consistently across the whole playing area, and the markings have to be unambiguous.
We check all of it against the relevant rulebook rather than the previous layout, and correct discrepancies during refurbishment when old lines come off during sanding.
A floor that performs well in the centre and poorly at one end has failed, whatever the average figure suggests. Inconsistency almost always originates beneath the surface: a compressed resilient layer, a batten that has lost contact, or localised sub-floor movement.
We assess across the full area rather than sampling conveniently, and repair the structure beneath before refinishing above. Resurfacing over a structural fault hides it for a season at most.
Venues are periodically asked to evidence that a surface is fit for purpose, and assurances are not evidence. We provide written documentation on completion covering the specification installed, the markings applied and the test results obtained.
Kept alongside maintenance records, it means a request for evidence is answered from a file rather than assembled retrospectively under pressure.
Our installation at Hornbury Academy shows the full process from bare sub-floor through to a finished, fully line-marked hall, delivered to a fixed programme while the school carried on around us.
For anyone weighing a new floor against another patch-up, it is a useful illustration of what the complete journey involves and what it produces.
~ 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
Granwood is a composite block of wood flour and cement, laid in a bitumen bed, installed in thousands of British schools and halls from the nineteen thirties onwards. A great many are still down and still serviceable, which says a good deal about how well they were made.
It is not timber and it must not be treated as timber. There is no grain and no wear layer in the usual sense, and aggressive sanding takes block that cannot be put back. Bitumen softens with heat, so a machine held too long in one place draws adhesive up through the joints. Some older bitumen beds contain asbestos, and we treat every one as suspect until testing says otherwise.
Restoration means rebedding loose blocks, replacing those that have broken up, preparing the surface with appropriate abrasives, and coating with a modified epoxy system designed for composite substrates with the markings applied within the system.
Most Granwood floors described as beyond saving are not. We will tell you honestly which situation yours is in.
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.
Facilities managers are usually working to a figure set before anybody looked at the floor, so it helps to know what moves it.
Area is the obvious factor, and bigger halls are cheaper per square metre because mobilisation is spread further. A four court hall almost always works out better value per metre than a single studio.
Condition matters more than size. A screen and recoat is a fraction of the cost of a full sand. Board repairs, replacing damaged sections and dealing with a failed subfloor all add, and they are the items that appear once the old lacquer comes off.
Markings are priced by what you need rather than what is there. Removing three redundant sets makes the hall clearer and the job cheaper.
Access and hours are the last variable. A hall we can work in continuously through a holiday costs less than the same hall done overnight around evening bookings. We quote both where it helps you weigh disruption against money.
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.
South Yorkshire brings us academy trust estates, council leisure facilities, university sport and a substantial amount of older building stock.
Trust work is the pattern we see most. A trust holding a dozen or more schools has that many sports halls, built decades apart and in widely differing condition. Surveying the whole estate and producing a costed priority order turns an unpredictable liability into a phased programme rather than a run of emergencies.
We have completed work at Hornbury Academy in Wakefield nearby, and the constraints were typical: a hall in constant use, a finish long overdue, and a fixed date to be back for the first day of term.
Leisure centres follow, where booking income means overnight and weekend working rather than a long closure.
The older school and church halls in the region frequently have Granwood floors. It is a composite block in a bitumen bed rather than timber, it needs a specialist approach, and most of the Granwood we are asked to look at is well worth restoring.
South Yorkshire enquiries are dominated by trusts and universities, and two projects cover most of what people want to know.
Hornbury Academy in Wakefield is the closest for school halls. Constant curriculum use, a finish that had gone well past its cycle, and a fixed term date. The floor went back to bare timber, damaged boards were replaced, and markings were reset from measured governing body dimensions with redundant sports removed while the floor was open.
Aston University is the comparison for campus sport, where the summer is filled by conferences and external hire rather than standing empty, so the working window is narrow and does not move. That was solved by surveying early, ordering materials ahead and staffing the job to finish inside the time available.
For a trust holding several halls, the more useful first step than any single quotation is a condition survey across the estate producing a costed priority order.
Colour is the part of a relining scheme most often decided badly, because it gets chosen from a chart in an office rather than on the floor under the hall lights.
Most halls have been refitted with LED lighting in the last decade, and LEDs render colour very differently from the fluorescent tubes they replaced. Two shades that look clearly distinct on a sample card can merge almost completely under the actual lighting, which is how halls end up with court markings nobody can follow.
So we bring samples and look at them in the room with the lights on before anything is ordered. It takes ten minutes and it prevents the most common complaint we hear about other contractors work.
The floor itself matters too. A pale maple floor takes different colours from a mid tone vinyl or a dark polyurethane, and a scheme designed for one will not necessarily read on the other. Where a hall is being recoloured as well as relined, the two decisions have to be made together rather than in sequence.
Considerably less than most people expect, because restoration rather than replacement is usually the answer. A full sand and seal typically costs a small fraction of a new floor. The survey is free, the quotation is fixed, and nothing is added later without your agreement.
The full area and the counties around it. Where a facility is some way from us, we bring all machinery and materials at the outset and complete everything within one agreed window.
A failed resilient layer or a batten that has lost contact beneath that area. It is a structural problem, so resurfacing will not fix it. We locate and repair the build-up underneath.
Yes. Our survey reports rank work by urgency so you can spread it across financial years, and we will say honestly what cannot safely wait.
Full sports halls, multi-court leisure facilities, specialist court installations and whole-estate programmes. If you are unsure whether your project fits, call and we will tell you straight away rather than wasting your time.
Yes. We deep clean, reseal, remark and fully recoat synthetic sports surfaces, and a PU floor recoated in a fresh colour with new markings looks like a new installation for a fraction of the cost.
Yes. We carry out pendulum slip resistance testing and provide the certificate, which is worth having on file for insurers, governing bodies and facilities audits.
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.
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.
Book a free survey of your floor in South Yorkshire 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.