CASE STUDY: INTEGRATED FLOORING SAVES TIME AND MONEY

Project: New Century Johnson County Parks and Recreation Fieldhouse facility
Location: New Century Kansas (near Kansas City), Missouri

Photo courtesy of Gerflor USA

The challenge: New Century Fieldhouse is Johnson County's premier indoor sports and multi-use facility. It features McDonald's Field, a state-of-the-art turf field for soccer, football, and other field sports while the building was programmed to include multiple court configurations for basketball, volleyball, and other court sports. It was intended to be available as community space to practice and compete in a variety of sports year-round in indoor comfort. In addition to providing home field and home court advantages to a variety of youth and adult sports leagues, the fieldhouse needed to offer a wide assortment of programs and activities for all ages and interests—from fitness and health to arts and crafts, from walking clubs to preschool enrichment. Other unique features included party suites, a lounge, and a large multipurpose room that could be reserved for meetings and special occasions.

The design solution: The full facility is made up of an impressive collection of athletic and support spaces. These include four full-length basketball courts, eight volleyball courts/four futsal courts, convenient upper and lower level concession stands, a large upper-level lounge area with flat screen TVs and court and field views, four upper-level party suites with court and field views, plus a 78-foot x 29-foot multipurpose room. In all over 45,000 square feet of resilient sports flooring was needed to cover all of the various spaces. In order to maintain project time schedules and construction budgets, an integrated floor product was specified that included a moisture mitigating backing and adhesive system. The designers were encouraged when they discovered that this type of system has been in use in the United States since 2009 with over 5 million square feet installed with NO moisture failures.

The results: The New Century Johnson County Fieldhouse became the first LEED Gold-certified community center in the Kansas City, Missouri metropolitan area. The selected flooring helped to achieve that goal with very low VOC emissions contributing to positive indoor air quality. The material itself contained 30 percent recycled content with 100 percent of manufacturing waste recycled. From an ongoing green building maintenance standpoint, the flooring came with a 10-year warranty and a life expectancy of more than 20 years. Waxing is not needed for the flooring during its full useful life, contributing to a reduction of over 80 percent in the use of water and detergents for maintenance.

Part of the good construction practices that helped contribute to meeting this and other project goals included the installation of the resilient sports flooring directly over poured concrete slabs. The 45,000 plus square feet of the integrated product was installed only 45 days after the concrete slab was poured without encountering any issues related to moisture. This step alone helped the project save many weeks of time that would have been otherwise spent waiting for the slab to cure further plus many thousands of dollars in cost. The finished floors are capable of handling sports activity as well as other multipurpose functions that require tables, chairs, and rolling loads.