BROWNSTOWN
The Brownstown Central High School Class of 2020 will be the first to walk on a new gymnasium floor to get their diplomas.
During a meeting earlier this month, the Brownstown Central Community School Corp. board of trustees unanimously approved Cincinnati Floor Co. to install an MVP floor for $145,802. That was the only bid received for the project.
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Assistant Superintendent Jade Peters said a crew will start tearing up the current 8,000-square-foot floor, which was installed when the high school opened in 1964, on March 9 and be completed by May 15. Graduation is May 23.
“They said they shouldn’t have any problems getting that done,” Peters said. “It takes them about a week to cut it out, to get it removed, and then they say it actually takes a long time to get the painting done.”
A committee was formed with the assistance of Jerry Brown with Celery Signs to design the new gym floor to be debuted at graduation.
“The striping and the design that we got, we’ve had a lot of comments and compliments on that,” Peters said. “It looks top-notch, like a professional floor.”
The bid opening was Feb. 4. Peters said Cincinnati Flooring Co.’s base floor came in at $114,819, but school officials chose the MVP floor.
“When we went and met with them in December, we kind of pitched that we could take the MVP floor and be their show arena,” he said. “There’s only one other high school that has it. These are the floors that they put in the NBA arenas and those types of things. The technology behind it with the vibration and the shock absorption is top-notch, so we’re pretty excited about that.”
Peters, some coaches and Maintenance Director Randy Ude visited Cincinnati Flooring Co.’s showroom, which featured sample floors they’ve made over the years and how they’ve evolved. The company started in 1894, and floors shown on its website are at Indiana University, Union College, University of Findlay and Whiteland High School.
Peters said he bounced a basketball on the MVP floor.
“If I’m standing on a standard floor, even the new up-to-date ones, you could feel the vibration in your feet. Now on that MVP floor, if you were dribbling there, I couldn’t feel it in my feet,” he said.
“What they were saying and the research shows that vibration is as much a cause of injury as the shock because vibration, they say, causes the muscles to pull off the bone, so their technology is let’s get this as safe a floor as we can,” he said. “Obviously, that’s our ultimate goal, too.”
Peters said the life expectancy of the floor is 50 to 60 years, which is in the range of how long the current floor has been down.
During the board meeting in January, Peters said the floor has been sanded until it can’t be sanded anymore. That’s done every seven years, and he said the last time that was done, nails were showing.
The board approved for Kovert Hawkins Architects Inc. of Jeffersonville to advertise open bids for the floor, and only one was received.
The good news is the bid came in much lower than the $225,000 Peters had built into the budget. He estimates architect fees will be between $7,000 and $8,000, but the project will still be well under budget.
“Looking at these prices and talking to other schools, those prices are extremely good,” Peters said. “Washington, the Hatchet House down there, got a new floor put in, and it was $190,000 and it was not the MVP floor.”
Doing the floor in the spring also saves the corporation some money, Peters said.
“They get really busy over the summer,” he said of Cincinnati Flooring Co. “We decided we use the gyms constantly over the summer, so we thought this would be a better option for us and save us some money. Thank you to Mr. (Joe) Sheffer and everybody at the high school for allowing us to come in there in the springtime and do that.”
While the floor is being redone, sports teams and physical education classes will use the nearby auxiliary gym. Peters said that gym was built in 2000, so that floor still has a long life.
The gym floor at the middle school, however, is starting to show its age and may need to be redone within the next 10 years, Peters said. That floor is larger than the one at the high school, so it will cost more.
In 2018, the high school gym’s locker rooms, including one that was from the original school building, were remodeled along with the areas for the band and press; wooden seating was replaced; and air conditioning was added.