It's a brand new wood floor made to look old-real old-which is nothing unusual in today's wood flooring business, except that this is a Final Floor basketball floor.
The floor was created by Chattanooga-based Praters Inc., which has been furnishing women's Final Four flooring for the past four years.
At the request of the NCAA, Praters made the floor paint crack by applying a chemical to it. "Normally, Praters does these very perfect floors, and then they get this one, and it has to look old and distressed," said Debbie Prater, one of the company's co-owners. "It was a challenge, believe me." The company usually uses oil-based paint on its sports floors, but here they used water-based after discovering oil-based paint did not crack like they wanted. Overtop went an oil-based finish.
The floor saw plenty of great basketball action Sunday evening when Texas A&M beat Stanford, and Notre Dame upset top-seeded UConn. If you missed that action, you can see the floor Tuesday evening during the championship match.
In addition to this floor made for the women's championship, Praters created two other floors used in NCAA regional basketball tournaments on both the men's and women's sides.
