BUILDINGBLUEPRINTS
Sports and Athletics
Specifying multipurpose and sports flooring for educational facilities.
Photos courtesy of RuckPate Architecture.
By Fred Schuster, AIA, Tim Woolever, ALA, and Dave Dillon
No Slipping and Sliding. Flooring such as
carpet, wood, rubber, cork and vinyl are all
excellent choices when considering the design
and functionality of a space, but careful
consideration had to be paid to an array of
performance capabilities when designing
sports and athletic spaces.
F
looring is an important part of any
school facility because it is literally the foundation on which the
students learn and grow. The flooring in
common areas and multipurpose spaces
must be able to handle the rigors associated with heavy foot traffic in educational
environments. The Park East and Park
West School of Grayslake, Ill., make up
the K-8 Park School Campus and provide
shared areas to reduce the redundancy of
space, which includes a learning resource
center and student services center, as well
as a multipurpose room and gymnasium.
Completed in 2007, this 186,112-squarefoot facility uses vinyl sports flooring
throughout its gym and homogenous sheet
vinyl in its multipurpose room.
Flooring such as carpet, wood, rubber,
52
|
School Planning & Management
cork and vinyl are all excellent choices
when considering the design and functionality of a space. With the Park School Campus gym and multipurpose room, however,
careful consideration had to be paid to an
array of performance capabilities. In this
case, vinyl provides better comfort and
playability than rubber in gymnasiums
that also serve as multi-purpose rooms,
and withstands heavy foot traffic better.
Options like wood or carpet can be cost
prohibitive due to extensive maintenance,
and tend to fade when exposed to UV light.
Similarly, cork floors may have to be resanded or refinished when they age, while
sand, grit and moisture negatively affect
its performance. Thus, for the Park School
Campus project, vinyl flooring provided
the best option.
|
July 2010
Regarding multipurpose areas, vinyl
can withstand heavy static and dynamic
loads sometimes associated with desks,
chairs, rolling carts, foldable lunch tables
or anything that is constantly moved.
Things to Consider
Maintenance — Maintenance programs
and floor upkeep also played a role in
choosing the right solution for the Park
School Campus gymnasium and multipurpose room. The flooring installed in both
areas contains a surface treatment that
allows school maintenance crews to easily
clean the flooring with water, so as not to
require polishing or waxing. Since vinyl
flooring with welded seams is impervious to liquid, cleanup of spills is easy and
the flooring in these buildings is highly
www.planning4education.com
resistant to stains for an added benefit. In
addition, an antimicrobial floor treatment,
which deters the growth of fungi and bacteria, was another added advantage. This is
vitally important in a school environment
where young children are in close contact
with one another.
Sports Properties — To ensure excel-
lent levels of safety and playability, the
Park School Campus project uses a sports
flooring that adheres to the new American
Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM)
F2772 regulations in multi-sports flooring.
The new floor regulations set benchmarks
for good sports floors based on shock
absorption and ball bounce. The higher the
shock absorption a floor provides the better
an athlete is protected from risk of injuries.
The ASTM F2772 requires a minimum of
90 percent ball rebound across the entire
sports flooring surface to further increase
playability.
Additionally, the Park School Campus
gymnasium and multipurpose room flooring offer the correct amount of grip and slide
for optimum sports play via a special floor
treatment inherit in the floors design. Players who dive for balls or fall on the flooring
can rest assured that the heat generated between them and the floor will be extremely
low so friction burns will not result.
when installing flooring, and although not
specific to the Park School Campus, the
architects at RuckPate say it is important
for a flooring to be able to withstand high
moisture subfloors in order to provide
quick installations to save time and money.
The floors recyclability was yet another
added value. Performance and cost can
sometimes trump a floor’s recyclability,
but it was a win-win solution for the Park
School Campus.
>> Fred Schuster, AIA, is vice president of
RuckPate Architecture. Tim Woolever, ALA, is
the project architect for RuckPate Architecture. Dave Dillon a territory sales manager
for Illinois/Indiana for Gerflor Taraflex Sports
Flooring.
The Right Stuff. Homogeneous flooring was
used for Park East and Park West School
multipurpose room (directly above) that
required a high traffic area solution with
ease of maintenance without waxing
required. Cushion back vinyl sports flooring
that meets all sports performance criteria
including ASTM F2772 was used for their
gymnasium (far left).
Design — According to RuckPate Archi-
tecture, color is an important tool in an
architect’s tool kit and can be used to affect
people’s perception and behavior. With
the Park School Campus project, having
good color choices was crucial in the design
process, and vinyl flooring provided this option. The architects chose to take advantage
of how the flooring came in rolls to easily
create block graphics and borders, and used
contrasting color inlays for the key and
jump circle of the basketball courts.
Installation and Recyclability — The Park
School Campus project also benefited from
the vinyl flooring’s quick installation and
recyclability. Moisture is always a concern
July 2010
|
School Planning & Management
|
53