Maple hardwood ingrained with basketball’s rich history

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.

“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. Avoid water 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 before a kiln finishes the process. From there, the Amasa mill turns the lumber into maple boards. Boards are then used to build panels that are pieced together with 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 trucked 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. 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.

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.”