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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Staffordshire and across the UK. Much of our work is for leisure operators running seven-day timetables where closing a hall is a revenue decision.
Established in 1987 and still family-run, we install, refurbish, sand, seal, mark and maintain indoor sports floors for schools, academies, colleges, universities, leisure trusts, local authorities and clubs. Every stage is carried out by our own team. We do not undertake domestic work; that is handled 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
Closing a leisure hall for a week is rarely acceptable, so most of our work in this sector is phased. A hall can be split into sections, with one area worked while the remainder stays in use, or the whole floor can be taken overnight across a series of shifts.
Both approaches need careful planning around curing times, and both cost slightly more than a straight closure. They almost always cost less than the lost bookings.
A public leisure hall sees a volume and variety of use no school hall matches: casual sessions, clubs, junior coaching, five-a-side leagues, events and parties, seven days a week.
Polyurethane and vinyl systems frequently outperform timber in that environment, tolerating trolleys, furniture and constant traffic while cleaning easily. Where sporting feel takes priority, timber remains the right answer. We fit all of them and will set out the honest trade-off.
Reactive maintenance is the most expensive way to run a floor. Planned maintenance covers an annual deep clean, condition inspection, recoating at the right moment, repairs, relining and slip testing on a fixed schedule and a predictable budget.
For an operator with several centres it also produces a consistent standard across the portfolio, and a documented record that satisfies both insurers and internal reporting.
Years of heavy use had left the sports hall floor at Aston University dull, patchy and worn along every busy lane. Our team sanded it back to bare timber, made good the damage, then rebuilt the finish with a durable seal and a full set of new markings, working around a demanding academic timetable.
The before and after photographs show what a properly executed refurbishment delivers: a floor that looks and plays like new, for a fraction of replacement cost and without weeks of disruption.
~ 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
Community buildings ask more of a floor than almost anything else, because the same square metres take a toddler group, a badminton club, a parish meeting, a fitness class and a wedding reception in the same week.
The characteristic damage is scoring from chairs and tables going out and back constantly, rather than the concentrated wear a sports hall shows. That is good news, because fine scoring sands out easily and these floors usually have plenty of timber left.
The other characteristic is decades of polish. Many community halls have been polished for thirty years, and that build up has to be removed chemically before sanding or it clogs every abrasive. We allow for it rather than discovering it.
We quote these jobs by element so a committee can see exactly what each part costs and phase it across two years if the funds require. That transparency matters more here than anywhere, and it is why much of this work comes by recommendation from one committee to another.
Sanding makes dust. The question is whether it stays in the room or ends up through the building, and that is a matter of equipment and preparation rather than luck.
Our machines run on sealed vacuum extraction rather than bag systems, which captures the great majority of it at source. We screen the working area, and we agree with your site team which doors, vents and air handling routes need isolating before we start. In buildings with shared ventilation, particularly leisure centres with a pool hall, that conversation matters.
Edges and corners are the point at which dust escapes on a badly run job, because hand machines are harder to extract from. We use extracted edge equipment for the same reason we use it everywhere else.
The room we are working in will be dusty. The rest of the building should not be, and if it is then something has been done wrong. We would rather set the expectation clearly than have you discover it.
Most sports floors are replaced later and more expensively than they needed to be, because nobody was watching them.
An inspection is a short, structured visit that produces a written report on the state of the floor: the finish, the markings, the boards, the structure beneath, moisture readings, the remaining wear layer and anything that needs attention now rather than later. It comes with photographs and a rough cost against each recommendation.
That document does two useful things. It tells a business manager or an operations lead what is coming, so a floor appears in a budget rather than as an emergency. And it creates a record over time, so you can see whether a problem is stable or getting worse.
For organisations with several floors it is the single most valuable thing we do, because it converts an unpredictable estate risk into a plannable one. Discovering in July that a hall cannot open in September is the situation everybody wants to avoid, and it is entirely avoidable.
Netball is played on hard stops. The footwork rule means players land, plant and pivot rather than running through the ball, which puts a specific demand on the surface.
Grip has to be predictable. A player receiving in the goal circle needs to stop dead and trust the floor, and a surface polished smooth through the centre third is a genuine injury risk rather than an inconvenience.
A full court is 30.5 by 15.25 metres in three equal thirds, with a 0.9 metre centre circle and goal circles of 4.9 metre radius. Lines are 50 millimetres wide, and because the lines count as part of the area they enclose, marking them thin genuinely changes the game.
England Netball asks for 3.05 metres of run off for competitive play, which few school halls achieve. Where a hall cannot take a full court we mark a proportionally reduced court or lay out for a junior format, rather than marking something tight to the walls that is unsafe to play on.
Staffordshire gives us a mix of academy trust estates, school sports halls, leisure facilities and a considerable amount of older community building stock.
School and academy halls are the largest group. Many date from the nineteen sixties and seventies with sprung timber floors that are structurally sound but have gone too long between refinishes. Those are almost always better restored than replaced, and a proper survey usually finds considerably more life left than the school has been told.
Granwood turns up regularly in this part of the country, in school halls and church halls alike, and it is frequently written off when it should not be. A Granwood floor with sound blocks and an intact bitumen bed is worth restoring at a fraction of the cost of replacement, particularly once the cost of lifting a bitumen bed is taken into account.
Leisure centres and community sports facilities follow, where keeping the building trading means overnight working.
Village halls and club buildings make up the rest, and those restore for surprisingly modest sums.
Staffordshire has a great deal of older school and church hall stock, so the project worth knowing about is St George School in Ascot.
The hall there had a Granwood floor which more than one contractor had condemned. Granwood is a composite block of wood flour and cement laid in a bitumen bed. It has no grain and no wear layer in the timber sense, aggressive sanding removes block that cannot be replaced, and the bed softens with heat. We assessed the blocks, rebedded the loose ones, replaced those that had broken up, prepared the surface appropriately and coated it with a modified epoxy system with the markings sealed within it.
The floor has years of life left at a fraction of the cost of replacement, which would have meant lifting a bitumen bed as well.
For post war school halls, Hornbury Academy in Wakefield is the closer comparison: an overdue finish, a fixed term date, and markings reset from measured dimensions.
Price follows the size of the hall, the condition of the existing floor and the specification you choose rather than the postcode. Refurbishing a sound floor costs a fraction of replacing it, which is why we always price that route first. The survey is free and the quotation is fixed in writing.
Yes. Coverage is genuinely national, and where several facilities in one area need work, booking together shares the mobilisation and reduces the cost for each of them.
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.
Almost always, and it is usually the right answer. Sanding, repairing and resealing costs a fraction of a new floor with far less disruption. We only recommend replacement where moisture or sub-floor failure genuinely rules restoration out.
Every two to three years for most halls. Baselines and service areas wear first, so courts become uneven in appearance long before the floor itself needs attention.
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.
Because we survey properly we usually know what is coming and allow for it in the quotation as expected work rather than presenting it later as an extra. Genuinely unforeseeable finds are rare.
The blocks and boards themselves are not the concern, but bitumen adhesive beds used before the mid nineteen eighties can contain it. We treat every bitumen bedded floor as suspect until testing confirms otherwise.
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.
Surface marks and worn lacquer come out easily. Deep water staining and anything soaked into open timber may remain faintly visible, and we will tell you honestly at survey what to expect.
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.
Book a free survey of your floor in Staffordshire 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.