Athletic FacilitiesCentral OhioColumbus

Northland High School Gymnasium Upgrade

Northland High School's gymnasium in Columbus needed the things a hard-used gym always needs first: bleachers, goals, padding and a floor that had absorbed years of practice, and it was a difficult room to hear an announcement in.

Columbus City Schools carried the work on a pre-bid Gordian job order contract that refreshed the gym and the auditorium together. On the gym side, the contract begins by naming what stays. The side court hoops, the Huddle camera and the existing sound system are listed as existing to remain, and the flags and banners are taken down, stored and reinstalled around the work.

What is replaced is the equipment that carries the load. Bleachers, main basketball goals, gym padding, scorer table, volleyball nets and poles, lighting, the double doors and their hardware, and the scissor gates all come out and go back new. The scoreboards are replaced with wirelessly operated units, without a protective cage. The floor is sanded and refinished, and the walls and ceilings are painted.

The rest of the scope addresses the room rather than its contents. Supply ductwork is replaced with fabric ductwork, the return air path is reworked to bring the noise down, sound attenuation is provided, the folding wall is removed and its opening infilled, and team chairs are furnished. The district ends up with a gym that seats, lights and sounds like a current facility, and with a written record of the equipment that was checked and kept.

Dark green lockers installed in the Northland gymnasium locker room

Technical Discussion

Deciding what stays in a gym refresh

The first list in this gym scope is not a demolition list. It is a list of what remains: the side court hoops, the Huddle camera, the existing sound system, and the flags and banners, which come down, go into storage and go back up. Naming those items is as much of a design decision as naming the bleachers that go to the scrap bin, and it is where a refresh budget is actually won.

Naming what stays does two jobs. The first is protection. Everything on that list has to survive a floor sanding, a ceiling repaint, a bleacher demolition and a lighting replacement happening around it, which means it gets masked, isolated, worked around and reconnected rather than quietly damaged and argued about later. Written into the scope, it is the installer's responsibility. Left unwritten, it is a change order.

The second job is funding the rest. The replacement list here is long: bleachers, main goals, padding, scorer table, volleyball nets and poles, lighting, double doors with hardware, scissor gates, and wirelessly operated scoreboards. A gym that also bought a new sound system would have had to give something on that list up. Keeping a working system and a current camera is what paid for the equipment that students touch every day.

The interesting part is that the room still gets a sound answer, just not a speaker one. The supply ductwork is replaced with fabric duct, the return air path is reworked specifically to reduce noise, and sound attenuation is provided. In a hard-surfaced gym the usual complaint is that announcements are unintelligible, and the cause is far more often the background noise level and the reverberation than the amplifier. Fixing the room lets the existing system do its job.

Our Work