Centennial Basketball Courts

Concrete gives you one window. Once the last truck pulls away, the clock runs on bleed water, set time, and the exact moment each finishing step has to happen, and none of it waits for anybody. On a driveway a small mistake in that window means a slightly rough patch. On a basketball court it means a dead spot you'll feel on every dribble for twenty years.

That's why we treat court pours differently from the rest of our flatwork. More hands on site, a plan written before the first truck backs in, and a crew that's watching the surface rather than the clock. Courts are going into back yards all over Piney Creek and Homestead, and the difference between one that plays true and one that doesn't happens on a single morning.

Everything that has to be right before concrete arrives

Base sets the ceiling on flatness. You cannot float out a low spot in the subgrade, so we grade the aggregate to the same tolerance we want in the finished surface and compact it in lifts. A laser goes on it repeatedly, not once. Any place a machine tracked through after grading gets reworked.

Then the pitch. A court has to shed water or it holds puddles and grows algae in the shade, but too much slope and the ball rolls away from you all afternoon. We take it in one direction only, gently, so the surface is a single tilted plane rather than a crown or a valley. One plane. That's the whole idea, and it's what makes a bounce predictable anywhere on the court.

Steel goes in on chairs, at the depth the design calls for. Hoop footing gets dug and formed before pour day, sized for the pole and the twisting force a backboard puts on it, and isolated from the slab so the two can move separately. Sleeve or anchor bolts get set to the manufacturer's template, checked twice, because that template is not something you fix later with a hammer.

The finishing window, step by step

The hours while the truck is here

We place a court in strips and keep the concrete moving, because a cold joint in the middle of a playing surface is a permanent line. Screed follows the pour, bull float follows the screed, and one person does nothing but watch the plane with a straightedge and call out where it needs another pass.

Then comes the part that looks like standing around. Bleed water rises and it has to leave on its own. Touch the surface early and you work that water back into the paste at the top, which weakens exactly the layer a ball bounces off. So we wait, and we watch, and on a windy afternoon at this elevation that wait can be short and the crew has to be ready to move fast.

Finishing is a judgment call. Too smooth and the court is slick when it's damp. Too rough and it chews the ball and skins knees. We aim for a light, even texture with enough grip for quick footwork and not so much that the bounce goes dull. Saw cuts follow the same day, laid out on a square grid that we align with the lines so a seam never lands where somebody is dribbling hard.

What comes with a court we build

• Grade shot across the whole pad before base material goes anywhere
• Aggregate base compacted in lifts and lasered to court tolerance
• Hoop footing dug, formed, and isolated from the slab, anchors set to the template
• Reinforcement on chairs, sized to the slab, not mesh laid on dirt
• A single-plane slope for drainage, oriented so runoff leaves the play area
• Joints sawed the same day on a layout that dodges the key and the arc
• Cure protected, plus a written schedule of when you can play and when to coat