What can you buy for eight grand? Usually a used NBA portable basketball floor would not be on that list. But that's all that Paul Bryant, athletic director at Eureka, Ill.-based Eureka College, managed to land when searching for a new basketball floor for his Division III school's Reagan Center. Recently, by way of lucky happenstance and some deft negotiating, Bryant netted a used portable basketball floor for just $8,000.
The floor was formerly used by the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves for practices. Then, according to the Peoria Journal Star, it came to the possession of the brother of Bruce Ruder, a Eureka local, for a business deal that never went through. When Bryant happened to see Ruder at a local high school track meet, the topic of the floor came up, and the pair immediately went to look at it where it sat in storage.
"I knew what I was willing to pay," Bryant said, "and I had been shopping around. It was basically just pure, old-fashioned negotiation between me and the vendor."
In June, some of the school's football players hauled the floor pieces off a flatbed trailer. For installation, sanding and finishing, Bryant worked with Clarkston, Mich.-based Game Day Athletics' Tom Petrie; the two had worked together in the past on a campus flooring project. "He was very good at how he handled the floor and how he took care of it, and we wanted to work with him again," Bryant said. Bryant himself helped apply some finishing touches. "I even painted both of the men's three point lines," he said.
The finishing and line painting are done, and the only task that awaits is installation of the "Championship Circle" at midcourt. Designed by the school's Art Department, Championship Circle will honor Eureka College's 1994 NAIA national championship in men's basketball.
