BY AARON BEARD
(AP NEWS) Down on hands and knees in the Alamodome, workers lurched forward to generate enough leverage to slide one large wood panel alongside another.
Nearby was a 15-pound sledgehammer at the ready for a few swings into the panel sides – a plastic block absorbing the impact and providing protection to the precious wood – to wedge them into place.
It took the crew of more than a dozen men and women nearly four hours to complete the immaculately painted puzzle. This work, along with a similar grind in Florida, creates one of the grandest stages in sports: The college basketball courts used at the men’s and women’s Final Four.
The final games of the NCAA tournaments over the next several days take place on painstakingly crafted courts, pieces of Americana built by Connor Sports from wood harvested in the same region as the postage-stamp Michigan town the company calls home. Men’s teams in San Antonio and the women in Tampa, Florida, can earn places in history on the same wood that has been the sport’s foundation for a more than a century.
That wood – hard maple – is a thread connecting seemingly everything in basketball. Big shots. Epic games. Crushing losses. The highest levels of NBA and international play, through college and down all the way to grade-school games on lowered baskets.
“The tradition of the game of basketball was created on hardwood,” said Zach Riberdy, Connor Sports’ marketing director. “The squeak. ... I can still grimace at some of the floor burns I got diving for loose balls. That’s something you’re never going to be able to replace. It’s so unique to our game. It’s tough to put into words just how much of an impact one tree has on the landscape of the game.”
Ingrained history
History lives in those maple grains.
There’s Bobby Plump’s famed shot in 1954 that gave Milan High School (coached by one Marvin Wood) the Indiana state championship, inspiring the movie “Hoosiers” that recreated the moment with Jimmy Chitwood’s last-second release at Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse.
The wood? Northern hard maple, still in place more than seven decades later at the venerable “Old Barn.”
At Duke, in famously rowdy Cameron Indoor Stadium, three NCAA title-winning teams have played on the court made by Ohio’s Robbins Sports Surfaces and installed in 1997. There’s a chance for a fourth, too, with the Blue Devils in San Antonio.
And there’s tons of March Madness lore. Kris Jenkins’ title-winning 3 for the Villanova men in 2016. Arike Ogunbowale’s buzzer-beater for the Notre Dame’s women title two years later. Virginia’s men returning from the 16-versus-1 upset against UMBC for a redemptive 2019 title.
And last year, UConn becoming only the third men’s program to win a repeat title since UCLA’s run of seven straight from 1967-73.
All on hard maple.
Why maple?
To Connor Sports technical director Jason Gasperich, it’s no coincidence that the Maple Flooring Manufacturers Association was founded six years after James Naismith introduced the first basketball game in December 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Simply put, it’s stood the test of time — tried and trusted. It grows slower than the softer maples, it’s denser and harder according to a test called the janka where one measures how much force is required to embed a small steel ball halfway into the wood.
“Very few games are played on a floor that isn’t maple,” Gasperich said. “There’s a couple of exceptions, but maple is really the industry standard.”
MFMA executive vice president Steve Bernard said his association’s certification is reserved for hard maple coming from trees grown north of the 35th parallel – the latitude line running along Tennessee’s southern border — and manufactured in the United States. Gasperich said wood for the Final Four courts is mostly from northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
That wood is durable, used on long-ago factory and warehouse floors before becoming the go-to for basketball courts. Maintenance is fairly simple: generally an annual surface abrading to affix a finishing coat, then sanding to fully repaint and finish the court maybe every 10 years or so.
Otherwise, dustmops are a caretaker’s best friend.
“A lot of schools run their floor scrubbers on the floor,” Bernard said. “That’s a big no-no because you’re introducing water into the floor. I’ve had arguments with people that manufacture these and they say, ‘The water goes out and it sucks right back up.’ Well, you know, water always wins.”
Avoid that, Bernard said, and courts can last 75 to 80 years. That’s decades of dreams and memories packed into the wood, along with some quirky character accumulated in the form of a few squeaky panels or a dead spot where the ball just won’t bounce quite right.
Final floors
The road to the Final Four is a long one, particularly for Connor Sports.
Bundles of maple arrive in tiny Amasa, Michigan – a 2 1/2-hour drive north of Green Bay, Wisconsin — more than a year ahead of time. By then, it will have gone through processing mills to remove bark and branches to turn a cut-down tree into usable lumber.
Wood goes into a storage yard to dry out, typically requiring 4-6 months amid exposure to rain and snow. Upon reaching the right moisture level, wood is moved inside to a stacking shed and then a kiln to complete that drying-out process.
From there, the Amasa mill turns the lumber into maple boards. Boards are then used to build panels that are pieced together through tongue-and-groove edging to shape the court, with those panels including subflooring support that helps with shock absorption.
Connor Sports, which had its first Final Four court in 2006 coinciding with Florida’s repeat reign, typically starts building courts by August for regionals or earlier rounds. Then by November for the Final Four.
Once the hardwood is ready, it goes to finishing facilities in Texas and Ohio. Workers from partner companies spend another 3-4 weeks sanding and staining the wood, painting playing lines and designs, and removing imperfections, down to the tiniest paint bleeds.
From there, the court is stacked onto trucks and taken to the venues for installation.
And when it’s over, teams that win on those courts have dibs on buying them. Schools that do might sell pieces as souvenirs while using the most distinctive parts to create timeless displays, such as the Baylor men (2021) and South Carolina women (chasing a fourth title since 2017 this week in Tampa ) prominently placing wall-mounted sections featuring the Final Four logo in home arenas.
At Michigan State, a piece of the court from the 2000 title win is displayed in the Breslin Center.
“A piece of the floor just reminds me No. 1, how lucky I am to be at Michigan State, how lucky I am to win a national championship, how lucky I am to coach the players,” Spartans coach Tom Izzo said.
“A treat for me”
Roy Williams won three NCAA titles for his alma mater at North Carolina in a Hall of Fame career that included coaching at fellow blueblood Kansas. But he once was the fresh-out-of-college coach at Owen High School in the North Carolina mountains where he grew up.
That meant taking care of the court alongside handling Xs and Os.
“In Buncombe County where Owen is, they would refinish the floor about once every three years,” Williams recalled. “So you had to take care of your court or you were going to have a bad-looking place.”
Williams took it seriously, including any time students attempted a gym-crossing shortcut from a nearby parking lot.
“Kids would come in and if it was cold or rainy or something, they’d always cut through the gym,” Williams said. “And I used to raise Cain with them to make them stay off the court. Because I mopped it every morning or first thing when I got there, and mopped it a lot at night when we finished practice.”
That care stayed with him, down to “almost never” walking across the court to leave as a college coach. Rather, he tried to walk the baseline or sideline up until his 2021 retirement.
Williams can feel history emanating from the hardwood, too.
UNC’s Smith Center has the same maple court from the building’s January 1986 opening, spanning careers of program stars like current coach Hubert Davis, Antawn Jamison, Vince Carter and Atlantic Coast Conference all-time scoring leader Tyler Hansbrough. It also represents yet another tie for Williams with late mentor and coaching great Dean Smith, both having roamed the same sideline on the court now bearing Williams’ name.
Pieces of the 2005 and 2009 Final Four courts where Williams netted his first two titles are wall-mounted where the Tar Heels take the court. A similar display features the 2017 title win in the nearby practice gym. Williams even acquired his own section of the 2005 hardwood to keep within his family.
“To me, the practice in front of the public was always a really neat deal,” Williams said of Fridays at the men’s Final Four. “That day was a day that I loved, and the fans being there with their teams. Seeing that logo, the Final Four logo on the middle of the floor, was always a treat for me.”
Stirring dreams
Ask Anne Clendenin about the new Fishers Event Center and the former NCAA employee eagerly touts its Indiana roots, down to ingredients in the house-recipe burgers and soybean cooking oil.
And oh yes, that basketball court.
A year ago, it hosted the men’s Midwest Region games in Detroit, where Purdue clinched its first Final Four trip in 44 years.
Now it’s in Fishers, roughly 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis, for the concert and sports venue. Purdue passed on buying it, just as Clendenin’s facility was looking for a court ahead of its November grand opening.
Refinished and repainted for a Fishers-specific look, the court’s Hoosier State history is a frequent conversation starter.
“We were blessed to be in the right place at the right time to make that happen,” said Clendenin, the venue’s marketing director. “But oh man, when it showed up, I got teary-eyed. I was like, ‘This baby, we brought her home.’ We’re excited. It’s pretty cool, pretty cool.”
That was clear to Maya Makalusky, too.
Her Hamilton Southeastern High School team tussled with Fishers High in the local “Mudsock” rivalry doubleheader there in December, with their pregame practices marking the court’s first action since Purdue’s ticket-punching wins.
It only enhanced a special memory for the 18-year-old senior, who has signed with the home-state Hoosiers and was recently named Indiana Miss Basketball.
“On the bus we had been talking about how cool that was, that they were able to even got the court what we’d call back home to Indiana,” Makalusky said. “It’s kind of a cool artifact that we got to play on, and had the privilege to even see in person.”
It’s a tantalizing connection to history. And by this weekend, the sight of those Final Four midcourt logos on this year’s courts, even just on TV, will have her imagining possibilities of what could be ahead.
“I feel like I’m a little girl again,” she said, “just dreaming of getting there.”
