Prater's Flooring Is Returning To The Big Time: NCAA Finals
By J. Todd Foster |Editor |
When East Hamilton Middle-High School opened in 2009, it turned to Prater’s Flooring in Chattanooga for its gymnasium floor.
When the NCAA wanted new floors for its men’s and women’s Final Four tournament in March 2009, it also turned to Prater’s. And it will do it again come March for the 2013 tournament.
“We take the same approach to the middle schools and high schools as we do to the NCAA and NBA,” said owner John Prater.
Prater’s has made its mark worldwide, particularly as the largest maker of portable basketball courts -- some of which have been used in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center and on aircraft carriers.
Prater started the firm in 1990 after returning to Chattanooga with his wife from Texas. He had been a manufacturer’s representative in the sanitary supply business and concedes he had no experience with flooring.
“I had never nailed a stick of wood in my life,” he said. “I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, to be honest with you.”
Prater’s Flooring started off doing nothing but athletic floors, first at Murray County High School in Chatsworth,Ga., and Monterey High School in Crossville, Tenn. It now also sells and installs residential hardwood floors.
Prater’s made its mark when it got away from polyurethane and experimented with the environmentally friendlier and healthier water-based urethane.
“Now we’re the largest supplier of water-based coatings in the country and have a 20-year track record with it where most others might have 10 or five years,” Prater said.
The firm also pioneered the use of large graphic logos on gym floors, he said.
Tennessee Wesleyan College “was the first to bite” and tasked Prater’s with putting a big bulldog on its gym floor. There was just one problem, though.
“I had no idea how I was going to do it,” Prater said.
He strapped an overhead projector to a rafter to project the bulldog image onto the floor with the idea of tracing it. But the athletic director caught him, so Prater had to fess up about being clueless.
He went to an artist buddy in town, a high school classmate, who told him to project the image onto the wall and trace it with carbon paper. Prater would go to athletic apparel stores to find logos or would use clip art. After tracing and perforating the image, he would put it on the gym floor and use panty hose to sift baby powder onto the logo and then trace logo with a pencil through the baby powder.
Then he painted the logo. When an affordable computer came out in 1994, Prater bought it and began using a crude version of computer-aided design.
“We’ve been precedent setting since the day we started with water-based finishes, with the types of paint we use, with the graphics capabilities, with the cutting-edge things being used on basketball floors,” Prater said.
Prater’s has installed many high school basketball courts in the region, with its bread and butter coming from Hamilton County schools. The firm recoats virtually every hardwood court in the area.
“It’s great, very durable,” said Michael Stone, head coach for the East Hamilton Hurricanes in Ooltewah. “The paint is pretty sharp looking. There are no dead spots. It’s used every day in P.E. and we’ve used it for a number of tournaments. It’s pretty easy to take care of.”
Stone, who has coached boys basketball all four of its seasons, actively participated in paint process for the gym floor.
“I’m pleased with the color consistency,” he said. “It’s kind of an odd shade of green.”
In 2004, Prater’s got into portable basketball floors. They’re constructed at its Chattanooga headquarters and at the former Peerless Mill in Rossville, where Prater’s needed its 70,000 square feet for expansion. The portable floors consist of 4-foot-by-8-foot sections that are hooked together with steel, sort of like a giant puzzle. Prater’s uses a lambs wool applicator to stain and polish the floors, which then are shipped on a flatbed nationwide.
It’s even working on its own proprietary version of a lambs wool applicator.
“There’s nothing easy about what we do,” Prater said.
Portable floors cost about $100,000, while permanent courts can range from $150,000 to $250,000. Some of Prater’s portable courts have been rented for use in interesting locations.
In 2011, they installed a court in Manhattan’s Union Square for The People’s Games, a tournament that featured streetballers from Los Angeles playing against New York City’s finest.
In 2004, Prater’s was selected to install the floor for the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. The Chattanooga firm put a floor in Rockefeller Center so the 2008 Olympics U.S. Men's Basketball Team could announce its Redeem Team for Beijing, China.
The 2004 Olympics U.S. Men’s Basketball Team disgraced itself by winning only five of eight games and finishing with the bronze medal behind Argentina and Italy. Team USA was blown out by Puerto Rico 92-73 and lost to Lithuania 94-90. It took overtime for the Americans to even defeat Macedonia.
USA basketball and Nike wanted to make a big show of revealing the Redeem Team, led by Lebron James and Kobe Bryant. So it leashed a court from Prater’s, which painted it red, white and blue with stars and stripes.
After Prater’s rents out a court, it takes it back, repaints it and sells it to the next buyer.
“We’ve had so many cool things happen,” Prater said.
On Veteran’s Day 2011, Prater’s put a court on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson for a game between North Carolina and Michigan State.
North Carolina defeated the Spartans 67-55 in the Quicken Loans Carrier Classic, which was attended by President Barack Obama and the first lady and was held to honor all military branches.
A few months ago, when the NCAA attempted to hold two East Coast games on aircraft carriers, disaster struck for Prater’s. The Florida-Georgetown game on the USS Bataan had to be halted at halftime when condensation formed on the court at Jacksonville. The Marquette-Ohio State game aboard the USS Yorktown was canceled outright in Charleston, S.C., because of condensation.
“Dew fell, and it became unsafe to play,” Prater said. “We kind of got some bad publicity. But we learned a lesson: We can’t do these games at night. But like Marquette coach Buzz Williams said, ‘I’ll come every year because it’s such an honor to be able to come in onto an aircraft carrier setting with our military to honor America.”
Prater often fields after-hours telephone calls from desperate entities in need of a portable court yesterday. He always picks up the phone because he knows it could mean a sale.
In 2006, NBA star Chris Webber’s manager rang Prater’s to get a court installed in his home and, later, his Sacramento, Calif., restaurant.
Prater’s has done floors for such college tournaments as the Maui Invitational, the Junkanoo Jam in the Bahamas and the Paradise Jam in St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands.
At the Paradise Jam, Prater got an urgent phone call just before he was heading to the airport to return from the Virginia Islands. A maintenance woman had spray painted the rims and got paint on Prater’s new portable floor.
“We were a couple of hours from the airport and they called in a panic and I’m like, ‘It’s OK, man, don’t worry about it, I’m on the way.’ I went back and fixed it with mineral spirits and a towel. The lady on the islands was crying when I walked in and hugged me when I left.”
On Prater’s office wall hangs a large photograph of the floor that the firm built for Boise State University. Prater said he didn’t realize that Boise was in the high desert. Wood comes from humid subtropical environments. The desert can cause improperly treated floors to crack and shrink. The pain can fail. He took a $50,000 loss on the floor.
So why is it the only floor pictured in his office?
“Because it reminds me every day that it’s a tough business,” Prater said. “It was awful. We screwed it up.”
Not long after came the debacle with the University of Cincinnati floor.It was shipped on a flatbed but was not taped properly.
“It would have been fine if it hadn’t rained,” he said. “The floor gets to Shoemaker Arena. I show up. When I get there, it’s raining harder than I’ve ever seen it rain in my life.”
The truck was parked beneath an overhang at the football field, next to the arena.
“All of the water was coming off like Niagara Falls,” Prater said. “I had to send people up there monthly to work on it at night just to get them through the basketball season. Then I took it back and fixed it. That was a $30,000 loss.
“I decided, I said it in a staff meeting, that we were never going to do any more portables as long as I lived. Two weeks later I get a call saying you want to do the Olympics? I’m like ‘hell yeah, absolutely.’
Athens was behind schedule on construction and needed a floor fast. Prater’s is the only flooring firm in the country capable of building six floors a month and recently finished its 200th portable floor.
The firm has 50 employees and $6 million in annual revenues; portables are a small part of the revenue and generate $800,000 a year, he said. He estimates that his firm has 30 to 40 percent of the total market share in portable floors.
“It’s still rough, man. It sounds like we are just raking in the cash, but the bottom line is very, very hard to get,” Prater said. “We are blessed to be where we are, but we’re a hand-to-mouth organization. Nobody’s making a killing off this work, but I love it, I love what we do.”
The company invests in its employees and pays their Social Security and provides health insurance and a 401(k) plan.
“We do things the old-fashioned way and we get killed because we do it that way,” he said. “We operate the way businesses are supposed to operate. We take care of our employees.”
The company gets its wood from a supplier and then paints them and finishes them and ships them to arenas across the country and overseas. Prater’s currently is working on the floors that will be used for the NCAA Final Four.
“I think the biggest attribute I have is that we are going to succeed no matter what,” Prater said. “We stick with it and we’re a can-do company.”
