CINCINNATI — With the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments underway, you may be spending hours watching teams go back and forth on courts across the country. What you may not know is that nearly half the teams in the tournament have a special tie to Cincinnati.
One local company, Robbins Sports Surfaces, supplies basketball courts for 31 of the 68 teams in the field.
"For us, we take pride in that," said Andy Pierce, the company's Portable Project Manager. "We like knowing nearly half the field is playing on our product."
Robbins Sports Surfaces began making portable basketball courts in the early 1950s. Since then, Pierce said the company has expanded to a global scale.
Some of the teams that Robbins Sports Surfaces works with include Xavier, Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina, St. John's, Michigan State and Auburn.
Hear more on the company's connection to college hoops in the video below:
While most people watching this month's tournaments will be rooting for one team, Pierce will be rooting for nearly half of them.
"It will be a fun tournament for us to watch to cheer those teams on," Pierce said.
The courts are made up of four-by-eight-foot wood panels.
"Each panel just kind of lays together like a puzzle grid," Pierce said.
Some floors are permanent and others, like the one at the Cintas Center, are portable. They're made up of about 225 sections that fasten together.
Pierce said what makes their floors special is what's underneath — what he calls a resilient package. It includes plastic cups and rubber pads to help reduce the risk of injury for the athletes.
"They don't get the constant impact on their legs as much," Pierce said.
Robbins Sports Surfaces supplies courts for the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden. It also supplies the courts for the Men's Division II and Division III championships in Evansville and Fort Wayne, Indiana.
While they don't supply courts for the Men's Division I tournament, Pierce hopes that soon changes.
"Ultimately we have that vision that we want to be that supplier of everything," Pierce said.
It's more than just college hoops. Pierce said the company is now the future supplier of all NBA portable basketball courts.
"It's huge and, in fact, one of our biggest projects over the summer was we did all 30 of the NBA Cup Tournament floors," Pierce said.
As the madness continues this month, Pierce has quite a few teams he hopes will cut down the nets.
"We'll be cheering those teams all the way to the end hoping that when it's said in done, we can say we provide the floor for the national champion," said Pierce.
