Horner Sports Flooring

Since 1891 - The Oldest Name in Sports Flooring

Knowledge Base

What is a Multi-Stage Resilient Floor?

Blue circle icon with horizontal lines and a down arrow indicating a multi-stage resiliency floor.

Multi-Stage Resilient Floors

Multi-stage resilient Zenith system at Notre Dame Academy - Green Bay WI

Multi-Stage resilient sports flooring systems provide one of the safest, highest performing and most consistent sports surfaces available. Meticulously  engineered, these floor system are designed to meet the most stringent performance certifications.

The resilience of a Horner Sports Flooring, multi-stage floor comes from multiple components within the system. Combinations of pads and foam are used to tune the resilience to provide the best energy return, impact reduction, ball bounce and vibration control. Meeting all these goals and getting certification that these goals are met, requires a delicate balance of engineering and materials application. 

The Zenith family of Horner Sports Flooring is a Multi-Stage resilient flooring family.

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Founding Member of the MFMA

What is a High Wear and Tear Floor?

Blue circle icon with dial gauge indicating a wear and tear friendly floor.

High Wear and Tear Floors

High wear and tear flooring example, performance stageA high wear and tear floor resists high traffic and abrasion causing events. High wear and tear floors are ideal for rolling bleachers, portable goal towers and performance stages.

It is important to note that High Wear and Tear primarily refers to finish abrasion. It also includes other factors like loads and  resistance to stains, denting and other damaging events. 

It is also important to remember that all floors will experience wear and tear. Floors with this designation resist these events better.

Logo of the Maple Flooring Manufacturer Association consisting of a white outer band, a green band and a green maple leaf.
Founding Member of the MFMA

What is a Vented Sports Floor?

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Vented Sports Flooring

cutaway image of a vented sports floor showing area for air flow

One of the most difficult parts of maintaining a wood sports floor is controlling the environment in which it exists. The vast majority of wood sports flooring is installed into a depression in a concrete slab. The temperature and humidity above AND below the floor must be maintained within an acceptable range, and be roughly the same. A vented sports flooring system accomplishes this by having an area under the floor surface where air can freely move.

Maintaining the environment above the floor is accomplished by the HVAC system. In most cases this will manage above floor conditions.

The difficulty generally comes below the floor. New concrete outputs water vapor for a period of time and in new and refurbish installations, a vapor barrier is required. 

In addition, some Horner Sports Flooring systems have air spaces below the floor surface that allow for the free and voluminous flow of air and this movement can be enhanced with powered ventilation. 

Logo of the Maple Flooring Manufacturer Association consisting of a white outer band, a green band and a green maple leaf.
Founding Member of the MFMA

What is an Easy Installation Sports Floor?

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Easy to Install Sports Flooring

Easy Installation

There is often a debate about what type of flooring is easy to install. Floating, glued down, nailed down, poured, etc. The opinion on what is an easy installation is often a reflection of what the installer prefers. However, there are some generally recognized ideas about this. For the most part, the flooring with the least amount of components, is the easiest to install. However, they can also be the ones easiest to install incorrectly. 

We have tagged multiple easy installation floor systems on this site as “Easy to install”. They will display the icon above. For the most part, these will be the fastest to install, saving money on labor costs.

SuperTuff rubber flooring system - showing weight training equipment at Michigan Tech SDC

Rubber Flooring Systems

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Logo of the Maple Flooring Manufacturer Association consisting of a white outer band, a green band and a green maple leaf.
Founding Member of the MFMA

What is a Reduced Vibration Sports Floor?

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Reduced Vibration Sports Floor

Vibrations are everywhere. Sometimes they are a good thing like in a musical instrument, but often they are unwanted and cause problems.

High performance sports flooring is designed to give back some of the energy an athlete puts into it. When an athlete jumps, they press downward on the floor. The floor is deflected or compressed under this force. As the force the athlete applies peaks and then begins to reduce, the floor begins to decompress or deflect upward. This process gives back some of the energy the athlete used to deflect the floor. This is the quality we refer to as a floor’s resilience. The same process takes place to a lesser degree when a basketball is dribbled.

Vibration is the uncontrolled compression and decompression of the floor. Every resilient floor has a frequency at which it rings (vibrates). A reduced vibration floor is designed to minimize this ringing while still returning the most amount of energy possible.

Horner Sports Flooring’s ultra high performance Zenith system uses a two stage resilience design to provide a low vibration, high energy return system.

Logo of the Maple Flooring Manufacturer Association consisting of a white outer band, a green band and a green maple leaf.
Founding Member of the MFMA