COMMERCE, Texas – There will be a new look to The Field House for the upcoming 2014-15 athletic year after renovations were completed last week to the playing surface for both basketball and volleyball.
The renovation was performed by Z-Floor Sport Flooring, a company based out of Denton who services the Texas/Oklahoma region and has installed approximately 50 floors a year for nearly three decades.
“We have done floors similar to this, but never with this much stain,” Kevin Zablosky, founder of Z-Floor Sports Flooring, said. “It was definitely one of our bigger logos that we have ever done.”
The new-look floor features an oversized version of A&M-Commerce’s Lionhead logo, similar to that of the turf installed at Memorial Stadium in the summer of 2013. The logo will take the natural color of the wood floor, as will the inside of the three-point arch and top of the key.
The rest of the floor will take on a light-blue stain, covering the outside of the three-point arch to the midcourt stripe, encompassing the playing surface except for the midcourt logo.
The boundary lines and basketball markings are all in black, while the volleyball lines are outlined in white. The outer border of the court takes the dark-blue look of Lion Athletics and features text beneath either goal and in front of either bench.
Z-Floors used a second-embedder northern maple wood, and MFAA stamped wood, which is typical of what gym floors are made of in today’s age. According to Zablosky, the floor should last 50 years or more, barring moisture damage of humidity.
“We did not know exactly what the subfloor was going to be like, and it turned out to be one of the more tricky ones we have had to deal with “Zablosky said. “There was a lot of lumber in the subfloor and it left us with a lot of leveling to do.”
The renovation, which began in mid-March, is the first such change to the facility’s floor since it was installed more than six decades ago. Only periodic resurfacing has occurred to the structure in that time.