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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in the West Midlands and across the UK. A dense concentration of schools, universities and leisure facilities makes this one of our busiest regions for estate work.
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
Assessing an estate as a single exercise produces information that individual surveys never do: which floors share a common defect, which were installed by the same contractor to the same specification, and where a single intervention across several sites is cheaper than three separate ones.
We survey them together, report on them together, and price them as a programme. The comparison alone frequently changes which work gets done first.
University sport combines elite-standard requirements with genuinely punishing usage: performance squads in the morning, timetabled teaching through the day, clubs and intramural leagues into the evening.
That demands surfaces specified for both performance and volume, and programmes that fit vacation windows precisely. We plan around the academic calendar and provide the documented handovers estates departments require for their records.
Facilities hosting both performance sport and community access face a genuine conflict. Elite play wants the shock absorption and ball response defined in BS EN 14904; community use wants durability against furniture, footwear and constant traffic.
The workable answer is usually a high-quality system with a maintenance regime tuned to the volume rather than a compromise on the specification itself. We will set out precisely where the balance falls.
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
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.
A school crest or club badge at centre court is one of the few things that genuinely lifts a hall for a modest cost, and it is far cheaper done during a refinish than as a separate visit.
Logos are painted from your own artwork between coats of seal, so they sit under the final lacquer and wear at exactly the same rate as the floor around them. Anything applied over a finished floor will scuff and peel within a season, whatever the supplier claims about it.
We work the artwork up to the correct scale for the circle or the area it is going into, and we show you a layout before anything goes down. Colours are matched to your own brand rather than approximated.
Coloured keys and zoned areas work the same way and have the same effect. A hall with a filled key in a contrasting colour reads instantly and looks designed rather than institutional, and it costs very little on top of work already underway.
If a sports floor fails early, moisture is usually the reason, and it is the thing we test for before anything else.
Water reaches a timber floor from three directions. From below, through a slab with no effective damp proof membrane or one that has been compromised. From above, through roof leaks, radiator failures and over wet cleaning. And from the air, where a building swings between damp and dry and the timber moves with it.
The symptoms differ. Boards that cup, with edges lifting higher than centres, generally mean moisture from below or a spill. Boards that dome or lift in the middle of the hall usually mean the floor has expanded with nowhere to go, often because perimeter gaps have closed. Gaps that open every winter are a humidity swing rather than a fault.
Sealing over a wet floor guarantees failure, which is why we take readings rather than assume. Where a slab is giving off moisture we install a mitigation membrane before laying, and where the cause is a leak we will tell you to fix the building first.
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 West Midlands gives us one of the widest ranges of building stock anywhere we work, from Victorian school halls to modern university sports centres.
University and college sport is a substantial strand. We refinished the sports hall at Aston University, and the project is typical of the type: a heavily booked hall, no long summer shutdown because of conference and external use, and a fixed window in which to work.
Academy and school halls are the largest group by number, many from the nineteen sixties and seventies with sprung timber floors that are structurally sound but overdue a refinish. Those are usually strong restoration candidates.
Leisure centres and community sports facilities follow, where keeping the doors open means overnight working.
Granwood appears regularly in the older school and church halls here, and it needs a specialist approach rather than timber sanding. We have restored Granwood floors that other contractors had written off entirely, and it costs a fraction of replacement.
The range of building ages across the West Midlands produces an unusually wide spread of problems.
Granwood is the most distinctive. It appears in a great many older school and church halls, gets mistaken for timber and sanded accordingly, or is condemned outright and quoted for replacement. Where the blocks are sound and the bed intact, neither is necessary, and restoration with a modified epoxy system costs a fraction of replacement.
Post war sprung floors are the second group, and the common complaint is dead spots. That is a structural failure beneath the boards, and sanding the surface will not touch it.
Modern university and leisure facilities are the third, and there the wear is usually even and the question is timing. Those want catching on a maintenance cycle rather than rescuing, which is far cheaper and preserves the boards for future refinishes.
A good proportion of the relining we do is because a hall is being asked to do something different from what it was marked for.
Pickleball is the obvious recent example. It shares its footprint with badminton, so adding it is usually a matter of the kitchen lines and a centre service line rather than a whole new court. Walking netball, short mat bowls and indoor cricket all turn up for the same reason: a facility has picked up a new user group and the floor has not caught up.
The temptation is to add the new sport on top of everything already there. In a hall that already carries five sets of markings that makes the floor genuinely hard to use, so we would rather look at the whole scheme and take something off at the same time.
We will ask what is actually played now, in what proportion, and set out a hierarchy where the sport used most gets the clearest colour and the most visual weight. Fewer lines, correctly dimensioned, beats more lines every time.
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.
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.
We can provide the specification detail and firm costings that Condition Improvement Fund and Sport England style applications require, and our survey reports are written with that use in mind.
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.
Yes. We survey the slab for level and moisture first, install mitigation where readings require it, and specify the system to the actual timetable of the hall rather than to a standard answer.
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.
Yes, and for organisations with several floors it is where we usually start. You get a written report per site with photographs, moisture readings, remaining wear layer and a costed priority order.
Yes. We work as the specialist flooring element within refurbishment schemes and are used to main contractor site rules, inductions, permits and progress reporting.
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 West Midlands 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.