Athletic FacilitiesCentral OhioColumbus

Northland High School Gymnasium Upgrade 2025

Northland High School's gymnasium in Columbus has new bleachers, basketball goals, wall padding, wireless scoreboards, lighting, a scorer's table, volleyball equipment and doors, over a sanded and refinished floor with fresh paint on the walls and ceiling. Prodigy also made the room easier to hear in, replacing the supply ductwork with fabric duct, reworking the return air path and adding sound attenuation. Columbus City Schools bought the work through its pre-bid Gordian job order contract.

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.

Northland Vikings wall graphic above retracted bleachers in the renovated high school gymnasium

Dark green lockers installed in the Northland gymnasium locker room

Technical Discussion

Fabric duct and a quieter gym

The complaint in an older gym is usually that nobody can understand the announcer, and the usual response is a new sound system. Northland kept its sound system. The scope instead replaced the supply ductwork with fabric duct, reworked the return air path specifically to reduce noise, and added sound attenuation. That is a bet that the room was the problem, and the physics supports it.

Two gym sections. Sheet metal duct delivers air at high velocity through three diffusers. Fabric duct, installed at Northland, releases the same air at low velocity along its whole length. — Figure 1 — Fabric duct lowers the background noise in the gym by lowering air velocity at the outlet.

Speech has to beat the background

Intelligibility depends on how far speech rises above the noise already in the room. A margin of about 15 decibels is the common design target for learning spaces. A gym has two things working against that margin. The first is reverberation: a hard-surfaced gym can ring for 3 seconds or more, so each word arrives on top of the last, and treatment aims for about 2 seconds or less. The second is mechanical noise. Turning the amplifier up raises the speech and the reverberant mush together. Lowering the background is the only change that improves the margin at every seat.

Where duct noise comes from

Sheet metal duct in a gym delivers a large volume of air through a small number of diffusers, and a diffuser is loud in proportion to the speed of the air leaving it. The metal also carries fan rumble down its length and radiates it into the room. A fabric duct releases air through the fabric and through rows of small openings along its whole length, so the same airflow leaves at low velocity over hundreds of square feet instead of a few. There are no diffusers to hiss and no metal walls to drum. Fabric also does not dent when a ball hits it, weighs a fraction of the steel it replaces, and comes down for laundering.

The return path matters as much

Return air is the quieter-looking half of the system and often the louder one, because a return grille close to the fan gives fan noise a short, straight path into the room. Reworking the return to lengthen and line that path takes the fan out of the gym's background. With the supply and return both quieter and absorptive treatment shortening the ring, the sound system the school already owned has far less to overcome.

If announcements are unintelligible in your gym, stand in it with the air handlers on and the sound system off. What you hear is what every word has to beat.

Customer Testimonial

Garrett Brinkman

Columbus Public Schools · Project Manager · 1 month ago

Columbus City Schools featured the Northland High School capital improvements in its own project video — the renovated gymnasium with new lighting, graphics, scoreboard and resurfaced floor, the new athletic locker room, refreshed stadium seating, and an auditorium rebuilt with new seating, flooring, stage lighting and show technology.

Garrett Brinkman, Project Manager, Office of Capital Improvements, Columbus City Schools, walks Northland High School to show the results of a year long capital improvement project:

Athletics — a new locker room built to better support Northland student athletes and teams.
Gymnasium — fully renovated: new lighting, new graphics, a new scoreboard, and a resurfaced floor.
Stadium — refreshed seating at the existing football/track stadium, framed as improving the experience for students, families, staff and fans.
Auditorium — new seating and flooring, plus new stage lighting and updated show technology for theater productions, concerts and live events.
Soundbite from a school staff member on what the upgrades do for students: a sense of school pride, and "a sense of just fun."
Closing theme — the district frames it as more than a facilities investment: an investment in Northland's students, community and future.

Garrett Brinkman, Project Manager, Office of Capital Improvements, Columbus City Schools, walks Northland High School to show the results of a year long capital improvement project:

Athletics — a new locker room built to better support Northland student athletes and teams.
Gymnasium — fully renovated: new lighting, new graphics, a new scoreboard, and a resurfaced floor.
Stadium — refreshed seating at the existing football/track stadium, framed as improving the experience for students, families, staff and fans.
Auditorium — new seating and flooring, plus new stage lighting and updated show technology for theater productions, concerts and live events.
Soundbite from a school staff member on what the upgrades do for students: a sense of school pride, and "a sense of just fun."
Closing theme — the district frames it as more than a facilities investment: an investment in Northland's students, community and future.

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