Since 1984, Joe Wilson and Tim Klementti have built Gym-Con Ltd. of Barrie, Ontario into a firm that provides sports flooring for hockey arenas, fitness centres, aerobics facilities, exercise rooms and all types of gymnasiums. Flooring choices range from maple hardwood to polyurethane, padded PVC and synthetic rubber. Clients include the Toronto Raptors basketball club, University of Toronto, Centennial College and Durham College.
When contractor Gym-Con Ltd. of Barrie, Ont. launched its sports flooring business in 1984, weight room floors were still traditionally covered with carpet, and ice hockey arena floors were covered with used rubber escalator belts.
“We all know now that carpet won’t last when you drop weights on it and drag exercise bicycles across it,” says Joe Wilson, vice-president and sales and marketing manager with the company. “We originally supplied sports flooring and other equipment including backstops, scoreboards, bleachers and arena seating. But each of those areas developed into their own specialty, so we stuck with what we were best known for — sports flooring.”
Wilson and business partner Tim Klementti, the company’s president, have since built the business into a province-wide concern that provides sports flooring for hockey arenas, fitness centres, aerobics facilities, exercise rooms, day care centres, kindergarten rooms and all types of gymnasiums. Flooring choices range from maple hardwood to polyurethane, padded PVC and synthetic rubber. The company’s service line-up includes gymnasium floor refinishing, game line painting, custom logos, synthetic and hardwood sport floor maintenance and removal and disposal of old floors.
Gym-Con maintains a staff of nine office personnel and 20 union installers, with experience finely tuned to sports floor installation. Field crews have installed flooring from Cornwall to Windsor and Fort Albany to Pickle Lake. “We’ve even hauled flooring over ice roads after it was flown in to install in First Nations sporting facilities,” says Wilson.
At least 40 per cent of the work involves direct contracts with public sector clients including the educational marketplace, hospitals, rehab centres and recreation facilities. That number only increases when additional sub-contracts are included.
Working in the sports flooring market requires a combination of building exclusive relationships with suppliers and developing an excellent reputation for installation.
“The surfaces can’t look good without the best representation in installation and we carry the best products the market can supply,” says Wilson. “Most of our supplier relationships are based on exclusivity in the market.”
Recent work for the Toronto Raptors NBA club, for example, stems from Gym-Con’s relationship with a major supplier of NBA flooring.
“We’re the Ontario representative for that flooring product,” says Wilson.
The job included full replacement of the practice facility floor for the Toronto Raptors and full refurbishment of their game court floor as seen on Raptors TV broadcasts. Previously, Raptors athletes at the practice facility had suffered with lower body injuries.
“The new floor is absolutely state-of-the-art,” says Wilson. “The best thing you can train on now.”
Wilson notes that the Raptors practice floor must be a perfect replica of the game floor, to simulate actual game conditions. Gym-Con’s artist used a computer-generated vinyl template to perfectly recreate the Raptors logo to exact colour specifications. The rush job was completed in six weeks from teardown of the old floor to replacement, with as many as 10 installers assigned to the job at a time.
Other signature projects include full replacement of the 60,000-square-foot floor at the University of Toronto’s Athletic Centre Field House, the basketball surfaces for the Durham College Lords, all of the sports surfaces related to the redevelopment of Centennial College’s Scarborough Campus, the running track strip at the Air Canada Centre’s Toronto Maple Leafs conditioning room, and floors at Toronto’s Gary Roberts High Performance Centre fitness institute.
The company’s toughest job, however, was the conversion of the sports floors and track at Toronto’s Variety Village funded by Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.
“The facility was still open while we worked and we had to control dust, minimize noise and keep the place spotless while on the construction site, smack dab in the middle of the facility,” says Wilson. “To finish the job we had to apply sponsor logos in 14 different colours.”
The company is currently venturing into vibration control through the use of vibration-absorbent flooring.
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