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Court is too long at Craig’s new gym

JANESVILLE — No harm, no foul, as they say in the sports world.

Such is the case in Craig High School’s new fieldhouse, which has a basketball floor sized for the college game, not the shorter, standard length of high school courts.

The lines painted on the wooden floor will be removed and repainted sometime this summer, said Doug Bunton, school district business director.

The district won’t be charged for the work, Bunton said.

The fieldhouse, and one just like it at Parker High School across town, has room for four basketball courts. Four courts are laid out side-by-side across the width of the fieldhouse. Much of the floor is a rubberized surface, but the middle two courts are wood.

Laid out across the two wooden courts is a fifth court that runs with the length of the fieldhouse. That’s the court with lines painted too long.

The courts are laid out exactly the same way at Parker, with one difference: The Parker basketball coaches wanted the middle court to be college length, so it will remain just the way it is.

“The installer had brought the Parker plans with him, I guess, when they laid out the Craig floor,” Bunton said.

A standard high school basketball court is 84 feet long. A college floor is 10 feet longer. Bunton said he wasn’t sure exactly the lengths of the floors at Parker and Craig.

Parker Principal Steve Schroeder said head coaches Tom Klawitter and Jim LeMire asked for the longer floor during planning for the referendum-funded high school expansions.

Their reasons were twofold, Schroeder said: The varsity could work out sometimes on the longer court for better conditioning, and if a team made it to the state tournament, it could practice on a court that is the same size as the tournament venue, UW-Madison’s Kohl Center.

Craig had its reasons for wanting a high school-length floor. Bunton said the main reason is the likelihood Craig will move its competition venue from the old gym to the new one in the not-too-distant future.

The bleachers in the old gym are wearing out, and replacing them would mean bringing them up to date for handicapped accessibility, Bunton said. The requirements for those new bleachers would mean fewer seats in the Craig gym.

So Craig is likely to move its competition venue to the new fieldhouse, where it would have room to install more seats and where it would want a high school-sized court, Bunton said.

At Parker, however, there’s probably enough room to install up-to-date bleachers in the old gym and not lose seating, Bunton said.

“That’s not saying Parker won’t elect to move over,” Bunton said.

Bunton said the only down side to the mistake at Craig is that the gym will be closed for repairs for a week or two this summer.

Asked if there’s anything else in the two gyms that makes them different, Bunton said there’s just one:

“The color.”