UT sports camp floor goes to Faith Academy building
“Every summer the University of Texas holds basketball camps for about two weeks,” said Darrell Vaughn, Faith Academy’s director of development. “In order to hold the camps, they basically take out all the chairs and push back the seats in the Erwin Center and lay out two courts.”
Those two courts are Sport Court floors which feature interlocking panels to create a basketball surface, he said.
Vaughn said the Sport Court representatives knew of legendary Faith’s girls’ basketball coach Jerry English and thought the idea of having his team playing on one of their floors was a great opportunity. The company has offered one of the former UT basketball camp floors to Faith at 30 percent of the original cost.
“We’ve actually arranged to purchase a two-week used floor for our multipurpose building,” Vaughn said.
Faith Academy broke ground on the building in September. The facility will provide the private Christian school a place for the student body to meet as well as host basketball games, dances and other school events. Under the school’s master plan, officials included a gymnasium which will cost approximately $3 million.
The gymnasium is still in the plans, but officials said the addition of the multipurpose building would address several of the schools’ more immediate needs while costing about $500,000 instead.
Vaughn said a donor has stepped forward with the funds to put a down payment on the floor, which will cost $40,000.
Sport Court has been building playing surfaces since 1974. The company’s floor is the official playing surface for USA Volleyball and has been used as the NCAA volleyball championships floor for 16 years.
“We looked at several (flooring) options. There are some kind of floors you can simply pour over the concrete,” Vaughn said. “But if you look at the style of play Coach English and (boys’ basketball) Coach (Larry) Berkman coach, it’s very aggressive. So we needed a floor that mimicked a wood floor. This does and it doesn’t cost near as much.”
The Sport Court is interlocking, Vaughn said, and when the gymnasium is completed, the floor can be moved if the school decides to do so.
As for the progress of the multipurpose building, Vaughn said “things are not running behind.”
“The goal is we’ll be able to play our district (basketball) games in there,” he said.
District basketball starts Jan. 2.
daniel@thepicayune.com