Sports Equipment & Infrastructure Blog | Sport Systems - Building A Better Game

Two Tips for Proper Gym Floor Cover Use

Written by Ryan Wilby | Jun 1, 2017 10:24:30 AM

On the surface, these large, custom-sized slabs of vinyl may seem easy to use.  Just lay it down and trample away on it, is the thought of many of the misinformed.  While our gym floor covers are certainly designed using the toughest vinyl available to protect your coveted gym flooring, they do require a certain level of care and proper use to guarantee adequate protection.

While simply rolling out your gym floor cover ahead of your next non-sporting event in haste is relatively unlikely to result in any major damage, it is the compounding effects these activities can have that ultimately make the difference. 

As such, we have compiled a couple of helpful tips you can use in your facility when storing, placing and removing your gym floor cover to add yet another level of lasting protection to your gymnasium floor.

Prep the Area

As we stated above, far too often operators and maintenance staff carelessly roll out these large and heavy covers onto the gymnasium floor without much of a thought. The fact of the matter is large flooring surfaces such as gym floors are havens for dust, dirt and other small particles of debris. Over time, the consistent friction produced by both rolling out or removing your gym floor cover while catching dirt and debris can be harmful to the finish of your flooring.  Eventually, these damages can add up and often require costly floor refinishing much sooner than otherwise required.

Our recommendation is simple; have facility staff, volunteers or operators simply pass a dry mop over the entire gym floor surface before setting up. This fast and easy process will remove 99 percent of the debris that could otherwise damage your flooring.

If you wanted to go the extra mile, many facility operators in the know keep a pair of small brushes with their gym floor cover storage racks. What this does is allows staff members who are placing the cover into storage to quickly brush off the cover as it is wound up, keeping the cover clean ahead of the next scheduled use.

Watch Your Tape

Seam tape; one of our more popular accessoriesacross our entire product line.  While many facilities naturally try regular tape as substitutes, or worse, even duct tape, they always come back to this specially designed formula.

What happens with other tape products is that if they are improperly placed along the seams of the floor cover, they can leave a sticky residue, or worse, pull the finish up from the gym flooring below. Our formulated seam tape is designed strictly for use with our gym floor covers and will not leave any residue or stickiness that other tapes will, even if you do accidentally miss a seam.