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Flooring Professionals To The Leisure Industry
Courtship Flooring is a commercial sports flooring contractor working in Worcestershire and across the UK. Our work covers school estates, leisure facilities and clubs, with maintenance contracts forming a growing share.
Trading since 1987 and family-owned throughout, we handle indoor sports and commercial timber floors from first survey to long-term aftercare, with our own crew and equipment on site at every stage. Domestic and residential projects are the province of 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
A typical plan covers an annual machine deep clean, a written condition inspection, recoating when the seal warrants it, minor repairs, relining as required and pendulum slip testing with a report.
Just as importantly it includes training your own team on the correct daily and weekly routine, because the majority of the work protecting a floor happens between our visits rather than during them.
The numbers are not subtle. A floor deep cleaned properly and recoated on schedule will run a decade between full sands. The same floor left until it looks bad needs machines back in half that time, and every full sand permanently spends timber.
Across the life of a floor, planned maintenance costs materially less than reactive work while keeping the facility presentable throughout rather than cycling between shabby and refurbished.
Organisations with several buildings frequently end up with floors on entirely different trajectories, because each was maintained separately by whoever was available.
Bringing an estate onto a single maintenance schedule produces consistent standards, predictable budgeting and one set of records. It also means nobody has to work out which hall is quietly about to fail.
Not every floor we save sits in a sports centre. St Katherine’s had the kind of well-loved, well-worn hall floor that carries badminton one evening and a community event the next, and the committee wanted it rescued rather than replaced.
We restored it completely. The hall is now set for another few decades of everything it is asked to do.
~ 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 squash court floor is the one surface in a building where the standard sports hall lacquer is the wrong answer. Players plant hard and turn at the T, and a satin polyurethane that suits a hall polishes to glass under that load within a season.
Courts are sealed with a matt, high grip finish designed for squash, and the boards are usually left unsealed on the underside so they breathe. We check the tin, the wall to floor junction and the board fixings at the same time, because a loose board on a court is heard before it is seen.
Clubs in Worcestershire tend to run courts hard through the winter leagues, so the work is planned for the summer lull and the court handed back before the first fixture. Two courts can be done back to back in a week.
A dance studio asks different things of a floor from a sports hall. Dancers need controlled give underfoot and a surface with enough grip to stop a slide but not so much that a turn catches. Bare timber sealed too glossy sends dancers to the physio.
The usual answer is a sprung timber or semi sprung base with either a satin sealed timber surface or a dance vinyl laid over it. Where a school in Worcestershire shares the studio between dance, drama and exams, the vinyl often wins because it takes chairs and staging as well.
Drama studios take rostra, scenery and paint, so we specify a finish that will accept a scrub and a recoat every couple of years without a full sand. Mirrors and barres are coordinated so fixings do not end up through a sprung floor.
The question every site manager asks first is when the hall can be used again, and the answer belongs in writing for the exact product used, not in a rule of thumb. As a guide, light foot traffic is possible around twenty four hours after the final coat.
Full use, with goals refitted, mats down and trolleys rolling, is normally seventy two hours or more. Cold or humid conditions stretch both, and a school hall in the last week of August is not the same as one in February.
Footprints in a curing seal do not polish out, and neither do the marks of a basketball post wheeled back a day early. So we agree access before we start, sign the doors and, where the site allows, lock the room until the times have passed.
Moisture ends more sports floors than wear does, and it is the first thing we measure. Readings are taken in the boards and in the slab beneath at several points, because a single reading by the door tells you nothing about the centre of the hall.
Water arrives from three directions. Up through a slab with no working membrane, down from a roof leak or a burst radiator pipe, or out of the air in a building that swings between damp and dry across the year. Each leaves a different pattern of cupping, doming or gapping.
Where a slab is giving off moisture we lay a surface damp proof membrane before a new floor goes down. Where the cause is a leak, we tell you to fix the building first. Sealing over a wet floor guarantees failure, and no finish can change that.
Worcestershire brings us school and academy sport, independent school facilities, leisure centres and a substantial number of village and church halls.
School halls are the largest group. Independent schools in the county tend to maintain their floors on a proper cycle and come to us for preventative screen and recoat work. Academy and state halls more often arrive overdue, with the finish worn through and markings that have been copied rather than set out for several remarks running.
Granwood appears regularly in the older school and church halls here. It is a composite block laid in a bitumen bed rather than timber, it needs a specialist approach, and a Granwood floor with sound blocks is almost always worth restoring at a fraction of the cost of replacement.
Leisure and community sports facilities follow, where keeping the building trading means overnight working.
Village halls and club buildings make up the rest, and those old timber floors usually have plenty of depth left under decades of polish.
Worcestershire has a good deal of older school and church hall stock, so the project worth knowing about is St George School in Ascot.
That hall had a Granwood floor which more than one contractor had condemned as beyond saving. Granwood is a composite block of wood flour and cement laid in a bitumen bed rather than timber, with no grain and no wear layer in the usual sense. Sanded like timber it is permanently damaged, and its bed softens with heat. We assessed the blocks, rebedded the loose ones, replaced those that had broken up, prepared the surface with appropriate abrasives and coated it with a modified epoxy system, with the line markings applied within the system rather than sitting on top of it.
The floor has years of life left at a fraction of the cost of replacement, which would also have meant lifting a bitumen bed.
For community buildings, St Katherine Hall is the closer parallel: an old timber floor under decades of polish, restored rather than replaced.
Yes. Netball at 30.5 by 15.25 metres, basketball at 28 by 15 with a 6.75 metre arc, badminton at 13.4 by 6.1, all set out with laser and tape and the diagonals checked. We never copy the existing lines, because traced courts drift a little further at every remark.
Yes, and for leisure centres it usually does. The loud sanding is timed for the emptiest hours and the seal is applied at the end of the shift so the floor is walkable by opening. We price the overnight and daytime options side by side.
It is captured at the machine. Every sander including the edging equipment runs on sealed extraction, the hall is screened and taped, and shared ventilation is isolated by agreement with your site team. We vacuum down at the end of each shift so nothing leaves the room.
A full sand and seal wants the summer break. A recoat or a reline fits a half term or the Easter holiday, and Christmas suits short jobs provided the hall is heated for curing. Summer slots are booked by spring, so early enquiries get the best choice.
Our own directly employed team with our own machinery, from survey through to the final coat and back again for maintenance. Nothing is passed to a subcontractor. That is why the date we give holds and why a single warranty covers the whole floor.
Yes. Our survey reports are written with bids in mind: condition, photographs, moisture readings, remaining wear layer, the recommended work and firm costs. School business managers use them as the technical evidence, and we can supply a specification if the bid needs one.
Yes, every time. Desk and chair legs score a seal faster than any sport, and a hall that sits under exam furniture for a month without protection can need a recoat years early. The covering costs a fraction of the damage and rolls away afterwards.
We measure the timber left above the tongue at survey rather than guess. A solid strip floor that has been treated gently may take six or more; one sanded every few years may have none. Recoating between sands is how you keep those cycles in reserve.
Book a free survey of your sports floor in Worcestershire. We inspect the finish, the boards and the structure, then give you a fixed price and a maintenance plan that keeps the floor off the emergency list. Call 01823 674562 or send us a message.