It’s not a reach to declare today’s indoor sports venues as bigger and better than ever. Often, they represent hundreds upon hundreds of square feet dedicated to court sports, ice sports, turf activities and swimming — all under one roof. And while the building envelopes have expanded, so too have the options regarding equipment and controls that keep these facilities humming at peak efficiency.
“The general baseline expectation of technology performance in any aspect of our lives is pretty high,” says the representative of one major gym equipment manufacturer. “When I describe our everyday type of indoor gym facility, those typical customers have what would seem like normal expectations to us today, but they far exceed what the expectations were even 10 or 15 years ago.”
AB asked several equipment manufacturers to bring us up to date on the latest innovations within the indoor sports space. Here’s a summary of what we learned.
Basketball
Photo courtesy of Gared Performance Sports Systems
Basketball goals took their biggest leap forward with the 1978 NCAA Final Four debut of breakaway rims, a technology that didn’t achieve across-the-board NBA acceptance until three years later. Initial concerns centered on whether rims designed to be more forgiving with 250-pound humans hanging on them — thus reducing both player injury and the shatter risk posed by glass backboards — would alter the rebound response of the basketball itself.
More recent basketball goal developments target a wider range of competition. Gyms that seek to accommodate anything from elite AAU play to youth practices and games can now specify goals that allow the rim height to be adjusted nearly three feet — from the standard 10 feet to 7 feet, 2 inches. This is true of both ceiling-mounted units and portable, roll-in-place goals. Previously, maximum rim-adjustment range tended to be 2 feet. And like the breakaway rim before it, manufacturers have been careful to maintain the integrity of adjustable rims when they are being used for higher levels of competition — in terms of ball rebound, but also the precision of rim height in relation to the floor. Electrically controlled adjustable rims that are part of drop-down goal systems might make an audible click, ensuring that it has been returned exactly to its 10-foot-high position.
Rendering courtesy of Spalding
Volleyball
Rendering courtesy of Spalding
Photo courtesy of Bison
Again, precision is paramount, particularly given that setting the net height comes down to fractions of inches. Both floor-sleave-mounted uprights and ceiling-suspended net systems offer adjustability, but each product type has its distinct advantages. Floor systems, still the choice of a vast majority of facilities, have advanced to include lighter, stiffer uprights made of carbon, and those seeking a more affordable price point can choose hybrids that combine carbon and aluminum components. Overhead systems offer quick turnaround in venues that accommodate multiple sports — without the need for transport and storage of the uprights and net, and without the requisite floor sleeves and caps. In fact, with some models of ceiling-suspended net systems, nothing needs to touch the floor, mitigating injury risk posed by floor-level player collisions with the equipment.
Photo courtesy of Porter Athletic
Pickleball
Speaking of floor sleeves, new construction projects are starting to specify the ability to host indoor pickleball competition, which on the high end can include floor-mounted net-support posts. Some gyms and field houses may include a dozen or more sleeve caps in their floors to accommodate multiple pickleball courts and simultaneous matches. In multipurpose venues that wish to avoid excessive disruption to a court surface that must also host basketball and/or volleyball, portable net-support systems are available — with an increasing number of manufacturers entering this market. These systems are more than up to the rigors of temporary pickleball play.
In addition, companies are now supplying pickleball-specific multicourt venues with permanent, sleeve-mounted court dividers, just high enough (only slightly above the 3-foot-height of the pickleball net at its posts) to prevent wayward shots from encroaching upon neighboring matches without greatly inhibiting vision across the entire space. Temporary surface stanchions also are available, and either windscreen or netting can serve as the actual divider material.
Photo courtesy of Bison
Divider curtains
Indoor venues that welcome a variety of activity almost invariably incorporate divider curtains or netting to keep play separated and participants safe.
Even this seemingly straightforward equipment has evolved to meet specific applications. Venue operators can choose from curtains that are manually drawn from one side of a space to the other on a cable or track system, curtains that travel upward and fold accordion-style, curtains that roll upward, curtains featuring a motor in the middle that can roll the curtain in half the time, and curtains that take the form of the venue’s roofline. For example, a football practice facility that has a peaked roof down the center of the field and a 60-foot clearance for kicking and punting practice is likely to include a form-fold curtain that reaches all the way to the apex of the space.
In certain settings, such as school gyms, a value-priced portable divider net system may be employed.
Curtain materials have also evolved to withstand the demands of the growing number of sports that are coming indoors to train. Whereas curtains once needed only to contain bounding and airborne basketballs and volleyballs, sports such as baseball, softball and lacrosse involve smaller, harder projectiles traveling with significantly more velocity.
Training
Training equipment for indoor sports has gotten more sophisticated in recent years, as manufacturers seek to better simulate game-like conditions for players.
Basketball players may utilize a machine that not only collects their shots — hit or miss — but also launches the balls back to the perimeter. These systems allow players to program exactly where on the court they want the ball, as well as how many balls they want delivered to that location and at what pace. This drill customization, conducted by tapping a half-court layout interface, allows the athlete to slow the pace if they want to add a shot fake or a dribble move between shots. Athletes can tell the machine they want to catch the ball in one location, but shoot it from another — allowing the system to take the second location into account when compiling shooting statistics. Athletes can also tell the machine whether a location on the court represents a passer or a shooter. This allows more than one individual to participate in a drill by delivering the ball to the designated location at just the right pace for someone to provide an extra pass to the shooter located elsewhere on the court. Drill data can be compiled on an athlete’s phone, and players can compete with themselves while trying to top their personal best performance in a particular drill.
Volleyball players likewise are benefitting from new training technologies. One product combines easy portability (it can be disassembled and transported in a car) and battery power (eliminating the trip risk posed by cords cluttering the court) as it employs a mechanism of rotating drums to deliver hand-fed volleyballs to points all over the court, without damaging the balls. Users control the desired speed, spin and trajectory for drills ranging from setting to digging to receiving serves using a Bluetooth-enabled interface.
Photo courtesy of Porter Athletic
Controls
With all the moving parts that make up a modern gymnasium, being able to quickly and safely transition from one sport to another, or accommodate multiple sports simultaneously, is critical. Today’s control systems are more capable than ever of meeting the challenge.
Long gone are the days of turning a key or punching a multiple digit code into a touch pad to drop one basketball backstop from the ceiling at a time. This advanced to the use of separate codes to control two backstops at a time, then eventually four, eight, and so on.
Photo courtesy of Porter Athletic
Like the nature of the activity housed within modern mega-sports facilities, the equipment facilitating that activity never stays static for long. Innovation among manufacturers is virtually constant, as they strive to make indoor sports competition and practice as precise, convenient and safe as possible.
“It’s always something a little bit different and exciting every day, every week, every month, every year,” says the aforementioned manufacturer’s rep. “That’s what I love about this industry.”
