‘The Rug’ at This Gym Isn’t a Coach’s Toupee--It’s the Floor : Oak Park Basketball Savvy Called on Carpet by Coaches Who Complain of Burns, Bad Bounces on Soft Surface

Watching an athletic event in the gym at Oak Park High in Agoura is a unique experience. Crowds seem meek, sneakers don’t squeak. Players get rug burns.

The gym floor is carpeted.

“You feel like you’re playing Nerf basketball in there,” said Mike Smith, a junior varsity basketball player at nearby Calabasas High.

The rug has lain there since the gym opened in the spring of 1981, and almost four years later the rug is still being called on the carpet. Oak Park is believed to be the only high school in the state with a carpeted gym floor.

Former Oak Park basketball Coach Paul Robinson, asked his opinion of the carpet, told a reporter the other day: “I don’t use that kind of language anymore.”

“When I resigned,” added Robinson, who now coaches on wood at Mount Carmel High in San Diego, “one of the last things I wrote on my letter of resignation was that Oak Park would never have a contender with that kind of floor. . . .

“You can’t teach any defensive skills because you can’t slide on it--you have to pick your feet up really high--and you can’t teach your kids to take a charging foul because they’ll get injured too severely with rug burns.”

Even the district manager for the company that installed the carpet, Collins & Aikman, said it was “really not designed for highly competitive activity.”

It was designed to save money, which attracted Dan Thompson, superintendent of the Oak Park Unified School District and the man who ultimately decided to carpet the floor.

The gym at Oak Park is a multipurpose facility, and the rug was put down on the floor for the same reason people carpet their living rooms: It requires less maintenance than wood.

“The (original) cost was comparable to a hardwood floor,” Thompson said, “but we don’t have to worry about students taking their shoes off if we have a dance, we don’t have to worry about assemblies, we don’t have to worry about dusting the floor two or three times a day, we don’t have to worry about stripping it and painting it every year or two. . . .

“The operating cost of a hardwood floor is very high--the custodial cost. If you’re using the gym all day, you need to dust it three or four times a day. You need to strip it every year. It’s expensive.”

The carpet is vacuumed once or twice a week, Thompson said, and is steam-cleaned once a year.

“I think from an administrative point of view and from a financial point of view, it’s good,” he said.

But coaches and athletes hate it.

Oak Park junior varsity boys’ basketball Coach Jim Cox suggested that the administration “rip it up” and called it a “horrible surface” for basketball.

“A true basketball coach wouldn’t really like this facility,” said varsity basketball Coach Todd Corman. “It isn’t what basketball was meant to be played on. It wasn’t meant to be played on your living room carpet. It was meant to be played on hardwood.”

Although it no longer does so, Oak Park used to supply elbow pads and kneepads for its opponents.

Mark Groff, varsity boys’ basketball coach at St. Bonaventure High in Ventura, said several of his players had “open sores on their arms that were oozing for several days” after they fell on the carpet at Oak Park last season. He said they did not use the elbow pads provided by Oak Park because they were not used to them.

Rug burns are also a problem for girls’ volleyball teams. The sport requires a lot of diving.

“It’s very hard to dive because you stick to the floor,” said Oak Park junior Carla van Gorp, a varsity volleyball and basketball player.

Van Gorp said she was tripped during a basketball game and suffered a rug burn on her thigh that became infected and had to be treated by a doctor.

“When you try to slide on it,” she said of the floor, “your bare skin sticks and the rug pulls back.”

The rug also absorbs much of the gym’s noise.

“You don’t hear the bounce of the ball,” Corman said. “It’s very dull. It’s a thud. You don’t hear the squeaky sneakers. You can’t tell when someone is changing directions. . . .

“There’s not much echo and not much sound from the crowd because the carpet deadens the noise. It’s not very loud. It’s not much of a home-court advantage, except for the floor.”

Groff said the floor definitely gives Oak Park an advantage over teams that are playing on it for the first time.

“There’s just something psychological about seeing the carpet,” he said.

“Some of the kids, the first time they see it, it kind of blows their mind. They say, ‘What is it? What’s it going to do?’ They’ve never seen it. They’ve never been exposed to it. They’ve never even seen it on TV because the colleges and the pros don’t use that kind of floor.”

Visiting teams have to make special preparations to play at Oak Park, Groff said. Older shoes are preferable, he said, because they don’t grip as tightly to the carpet. “Sometimes if the kids don’t pick up their feet,” Groff said, “they’ll topple right over. Even the best, most coordinated kids will fall right over because when you stop, you stop. . . . We recommend that they wear shoes that are worn in and a little slick on the bottom.”

Visiting players also tend to outrun the ball when they’re dribbling, Groff said, because the carpet is slower than wood. And, on bounce passes, the ball tends to skip and stay low instead of coming up.

“We’re really cautious about throwing long bounce passes because they tend to stay down extra low,” Groff said. “When we’re doing our passing drills the day or two before we play there, we’ll make short bounce passes or no bounce passes at all.”

Collins & Aikman, which has a regional office in Calabasas, has produced carpets for high schools, churches, recreation centers, rehabilitation centers and junior high schools across the country.

The Bear Bryant Fieldhouse at the University of Alabama is carpeted, and so is the field house at Loyola University in New Orleans. Both are intramural facilities.

“The product was made specifically for a multipurpose-type recreation center, not for highly competitive activity,” said Herman Lemberg, district manager for Collins & Aikman. “It’s great for intramurals. Junior high and down it’s great . . . but not for the professionals or colleges or high schools.”

Oak Park opted for the carpet, however, because of its “ease of maintenance,” said former Athletic Director Ron Welch, who recommended the rug to the district.

Welch, who coached high school basketball for 27 years, said that when he was at Poway High in San Diego he had to sweep the floor as many as eight times a day.

“I think it’s a great product,” Welch said of the carpet. “It’s five years old, and to me it’s in just as good a shape as the day we put it in. And, believe me, that’s with no maintenance. If you took a hardwood floor and didn’t maintain it, you wouldn’t even be able to play on it after five years. . . .

“I realize that the carpet has drawbacks and that most people don’t like it. But for the purposes of Oak Park, which doesn’t have the personnel to maintain a wood floor, I think it was the proper choice.”

Instead of putting down a concrete base, which is typical in these kinds of installations, Oak Park put down a more expensive--and more flexible--wood base. It then had the carpet laid over that.

According to a company brochure, the Pro-Gym surface is composed of four layers, “fused together under high heat to prevent the possibility of delamination and unraveling.” The top layer is a dense, low-surface pile of nylon.

Lemberg said the carpet, which is designed to produce a true bounce and is more durable than an office carpet, will not have to be replaced at Oak Park for at least 10 more years. The carpet’s tight-looped construction prevents spills from being absorbed and allows the rug to be cleaned easily with a sponge or a rag. Burns, rips and tears can be patched.

Still, it has its drawbacks.

“It’s different,” said Oak Park Athletic Director Mark Jacobs. “It just doesn’t feel like a basketball court.”

Jacobs said he wouldn’t recommend a carpeted floor.

“I like the wood floor,” he said. “I like the sound of it. I like the shininess of it--the whole concept of wood. But then, on the other hand, financially it’s a lifesaver. . . .

“We don’t get that many complaints, but it’s nobody’s favorite gym. I’ll guarantee you that.”