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Keith McCord reportingThis weekend, the Final Four competitions in the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments are taking place. The men's championship game is tomorrow night; the women will play their final game on Tuesday.
Even though the men's and women's Final Four are in different cities, the tournaments have one thing very much in common, thanks to a Utah company.
When the NCAA basketball tournament reaches the Final Four, some of the best players in the game are showing their stuff, seen by millions of fans. This high-caliber play needs a high-caliber playing surface, and Connor Sport Court of Salt Lake City is the company the NCAA has turned to for the past four years to manufacture and install it.
Ron Cerny, president and CEO of Connor Sport Court, said, "There has to be resiliency in the floor, but also it has to be firm enough so that you have a ball bounce, that is true."
The NCAA has strict standards for the championship floors, and perhaps the most important is that the wood has to be maple, and not just from any maple tree. The wood has to come from trees grown above the 38th parallel. "It has to be north of that because you get the finer grain structure in the maple, so it's real critical of which maple it is, and it's all U.S. grown," Cerny said.
A couple of weeks ago, the floors, consisting of 248 4-by-8-foot sections, were loaded onto a semi truck at the company's manufacturing plant in Michigan. One semi headed to San Antonio, Texas, for the men's tournament; another to Tampa, Fla., where the women are playing.
Connor Sport Court also has fun during the transportation phase, making sure the trucks are clearly marked so everyone knows that there's a championship floor rumbling down the road! "And the truck drivers on the way down had radioed in, and they were telling us that cars were slowing down and honking, taking pictures," Cerny said.
The floors are put together like a jigsaw puzzle. It takes about five hours to get each one assembled.
When the tournaments end, the floors are usually purchased by the championship schools. Last year, the University of Florida cut its floor up in 1-by-2-foot sections and then sold them to fans and alumni as special souvenirs.
Connor Sport Court is also manufacturing flooring that will be used in Beijing for the Olympics this summer.
E-mail: kmccord@ksl.com
