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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Sussex and across the UK. We work extensively with performance spaces as well as sports halls, and a good deal of our work involves sprung construction.
Nearly four decades of specialist work sits behind every project: installation, refurbishment, sanding and sealing, court marking, slip testing and planned maintenance, all delivered in-house. Our clients are institutions and operators rather than households, and private homes are handled by Ryan’s Restorations.
Overnight/Weekend Installations
Professional Cleaning Demonstrations
Squash Court Maintenance
Recommended Cleaning Products
Professional Pendulum Slip Testing
Deep Clean & Reseal Service
The phrase gets used loosely. A floor that simply feels bouncy is not the same as one engineered to protect its users. A genuine sprung floor is built over a resilient sub-structure that compresses under impact and recovers, absorbing a measurable share of the force from every landing.
Too little give and the user takes the full impact; too much and the floor becomes unstable to turn and balance on. Both extremes cause injuries, which is why the build-up is specified against the discipline rather than chosen for feel.
The sub-structure protects the body; the surface determines how the work feels. Ballet and contemporary generally want a vinyl performance layer offering controlled slide for turns and floor work. Tap needs a harder, more responsive top for sound and articulation. Street and commercial classes are hardest on the surface and prioritise durability.
Studios teaching several disciplines in one room need a considered compromise rather than a default, and we will explain exactly where that compromise falls.
Performance floors lose consistency before they look worn, and inconsistent slide is what causes falls. Users notice it long before anyone spots a visual problem.
Refinishing restores an even surface across the whole area: sanding and resealing where the floor is timber, deep cleaning and appropriate treatment where it is a vinyl performance layer. We assess what you actually have before recommending either, since treating one as the other causes real damage.
The main sports hall at Liskeard Leisure Centre had taken years of public sessions, club blocks and league nights. We delivered a complete programme of sanding, re-lining and resealing, returning the hall to service looking like a new installation.
It is a fair illustration of how we handle leisure work: one tight programme, agreed dates, and a centre back in action on schedule.
~ 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
A new finish is only as good as the regime that follows it, and the fastest way to waste the money is to put the wrong mop on it in week one.
The guidance we hand over is deliberately short. Dust mop daily with a treated cloth to lift grit before it acts as an abrasive underfoot. Damp mop with a neutral cleaner made for sealed sports timber. Deal with spills quickly. Keep a decent mat run at the entrances, because most of the grit that wears a floor walks in on trainers.
What to avoid is equally short. No polish, no wax, nothing that promises shine. These build up, reduce slip resistance and eventually have to be stripped chemically at real cost. They are the most common cause of the slippery floors we are called out to.
Scrubber driers are fine if they are set up correctly and the water is picked up rather than left standing. We are happy to look at your machine settings while we are on site.
The damage that brings us back to a hall is frequently done in a single weekend rather than over years of sport, and it is almost always avoidable.
Exams are the most common culprit in schools. Several hundred desk feet placed on a sports floor and dragged into position will score it comprehensively. Proper protection sheeting, laid before the desks arrive rather than after, prevents all of it.
Events are the other. Staging, seating, scissor lifts and catering equipment wheeled across a sprung floor without protection damage both the surface and, where the loads are high enough, the structure beneath. Small hard wheels concentrate an enormous amount of weight into a tiny contact patch.
We can advise on the right protection for the loads involved, and it is worth having that conversation before an event rather than after. Sheeting costs very little compared with bringing a hall floor back from a weekend of being treated as a warehouse.
Sports floors are full of holes, and how they are dealt with says a good deal about the quality of a job.
Badminton and volleyball posts sit in floor sockets, and those sockets have to finish flush with the surface and stay watertight. During a refinish we lift the covers, clean out years of accumulated debris and dust, protect the sockets from sealer, and reset them to the new floor level. Sanding around a socket cover and sealing over it is the shortcut, and it leaves a raised ring that catches feet and machinery.
Basketball post fixings, wall bar mountings and floor boxes for power get the same treatment. Where a fitting has been removed at some point and the hole filled badly, we make it good properly with matching timber rather than filler.
Inspection covers, expansion joints and threshold trims all need setting to the finished level too. It is detail work and it is largely invisible when done well, which is rather the point.
Every quotation follows a site visit, because a sports floor holds information you cannot get from a photograph and a price given without it is a price that will change.
We take moisture readings in the boards and, where there is any reason for doubt, in the slab beneath. Moisture from below is the single most common cause of a new finish failing early, and it is far cheaper to find before the work than afterwards.
We measure the remaining wear layer. Every full sand removes timber, and a floor that has been through several cycles may be close to its fixings. Knowing where you stand tells you whether this is a floor to refinish now or a floor to plan on replacing in a few years.
We lift a vent or an edge trim and look underneath. Dead spots, squeaks and movement almost always start below the boards, and no amount of work on the surface will touch them.
Then we record the finish, the markings and the condition of the perimeter. The survey takes about an hour and it decides everything that follows.
Sussex, east and west, brings us independent school sport, academy trust estates, leisure operator facilities and a large number of community buildings.
Independent school halls, gymnasia and squash courts are a significant strand, with well maintained buildings, high expectations of finish quality and work planned well ahead into fixed holiday windows. Much of it is preventative rather than remedial.
Academy and state school halls are the larger group by number and more often arrive overdue, with the seal worn through in the traffic lanes and markings that have been copied rather than set out for several remarks running.
Leisure centres follow, where booking income means overnight and weekend working.
Village halls, church halls and club buildings make up the rest, and the county has a great many. We have worked at The Bradfield Club, and that project is a fair illustration of the type: an old timber floor with plenty of depth left, decades of accumulated finish, and a result that cost a fraction of replacement.
Sussex enquiries divide between well maintained independent school sport and halls that have been left rather longer.
Independent schools generally come to us preventatively, wanting the screen and recoat booked while the seal is still intact. That is the cheapest way to run a floor, and those halls go decades without needing a full sand.
Academy and community halls more often arrive remedial. The commonest presentation is a finish worn through in the traffic lanes with markings faded past the point of easy officiating, on a floor that is otherwise structurally sound and has plenty of board depth left.
The third recurring item is halls that have become slippery. Almost always the cause is polish build up from a cleaning product that promises shine, or a seal worn smooth where the traffic is heaviest. Both are correctable, and both are worth dealing with before an incident rather than after.
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.
Three things drive the figure: hall size, the amount of preparation the existing surface needs, and whether the sub-floor requires attention. All three are established at survey, after which the quotation is fixed. We do not price from a distance and then revise once work starts.
We cover the entire area and beyond. Our projects have taken us across the UK and internationally, and the planning method is the same wherever the building happens to be.
We carry the insurance and documentation institutional clients require, work to CDM where applicable, and provide method statements and risk assessments as standard.
We stop, tell you, and price the options before proceeding. Nothing gets sealed over and no additional work happens without your agreement in writing.
We recommend products suited to your floor and local water, and run a cleaning demonstration for your own team. Most of the work between our visits is theirs, so getting the routine right matters.
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.
A failed pad, cracked batten or tired cradle beneath the boards. It is a structural problem, and sanding the surface will not change how the floor feels. We lift the boards locally and replace the failed components.
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.
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.
Yes, provided it is set up correctly and picks the water up rather than leaving it standing. We are happy to check your machine settings while we are on site.
A well maintained hall wants a light screen and recoat every two to three years and a full sand roughly every ten. Sticking to that keeps the boards alive far longer, because every full sand removes timber permanently.
Book a free survey of your floor in Sussex 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.