Industry
Sports Flooring
Challenge
Albrighton Table Tennis Club faced significant operational and safety challenges due to a deteriorated, twenty-year-old playing surface. The floor exhibited severe water damage, pronounced unevenness, and hazardous peeling seams, resulting in a non-compliant and unsafe environment for players. These conditions compromised both athletic performance and member safety, necessitating a rapid and technically advanced flooring solution to meet modern standards and restore facility integrity.
Results
The installation of the Olympic-standard sprung sports floor by Durant Sports resulted in a perfectly level, structurally robust, and visually elite playing environment. All previous safety risks were eliminated, and the club was elevated to international specification, supporting continuous, seven-day-a-week use by 70-90 weekly members. The new surface ensures optimal traction, durability, and player safety, significantly enhancing both training and competitive play for all members.
Key Product
Gerflor AE85 Undercarriage, Gerflor Taraflex Recreation
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About Albrighton Table Tennis Club
Albrighton Table Tennis Club is a community amateur sports club, open seven days a week. Among the coaches on its roster is Desmond Douglas MBE — eleven times English national champion, a peak world ranking of equal No. 7, and an Olympian at Seoul in 1988. He was appointed MBE in 1987 for services to table tennis and still coaches across the country, Albrighton included.
The Challenge
Albrighton Table Tennis Club had run out of road with its playing surface. The original floor had been down twenty years and was peeling apart at the seams — far enough that the club had resorted to taping the joints with tarpaulin tape to stop players catching a foot as they shuffled between shots. Underneath, the chipboard subfloor had taken on water, blowing and warping the boards and leaving pronounced highs and lows across the hall.
"The primary problem we were trying to resolve was a severely degraded and hazardous playing surface that compromised safety and playability."
For a community club open seven days a week, that made the floor both a safety liability and a ceiling on the standard of play it could host. It was also a project the club had to fund itself, through a National Lottery grant and a crowdfunding campaign — so every pound had to work.
The club researched flooring products first, then went looking for contractors, approaching four companies by email and telephone. Only one came to look at the hall.
The Solution
Durant Sports specified a Gerflor Taraflex system built for the demands of the sport: a Taraflex AE 85 area-elastic undercarriage across the hall, finished with a Taraflex Recreation top surface and heat-welded seams - an Olympic standard floor. The undercarriage raises the playing surface by 85mm and delivers consistent shock absorption and uniform bounce across the whole floor — the opposite of what the club had been playing on.
Budget shaped the delivery as much as the specification. The club's own volunteers stripped out the old floor and helped with the installation, and Durant Sports built the programme around that arrangement rather than treating it as a complication.
"They seamlessly accommodated our budget constraints when we opted to handle the floor removal ourselves."
The Durant Sports fitting team completed the installation in three days and fitted 25mm skirting.
"Despite a minor supplier delay, the fitting team worked industriously to complete the installation within three days, keeping us on track for our reopening."
The Results
The club reopened on Sunday 13 September 2026.
"The new floor is perfectly level, firm, safe, and grippy, offering an elite environment for our table tennis players."
"The facility now boasts an international-standard finish, complete with heat-welded seams and a high-quality sprung floor with hard spruce plywood."
The hall is in use seven days a week by between seventy and ninety members, alongside guest players and coaches — among them Desmond Douglas MBE, eleven times English national champion and a Seoul 1988 Olympian, who coaches at the club and backed its Lottery funding application. It serves every age group for sport, leisure and social wellbeing, and the club is now building on the facility to bring younger and older players into the gam
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