St. John’s new gym floor ready for action

By Editor | November 12, 2024 |

By Carmen Ensinger

One might have noticed an absence of home games for the St. John’s Lady Redbirds this season. That is because their gym floor was severely damaged during the heavy rains Memorial Day weekend. In fact, the entire school was damaged in the downpour that saw over five inches of rain come down in less than half an hour.
St. John’s Athletic Director Jay Eilerman explained how the situation came to be and the damage it caused to the school.
“The rain came down so fast and in such a short time that the water was about a foot and a half up on the gym doors and it was just pushing into the gym,” he said. “The water was just literally running across the gym floor and it made it all the way into the school on the south side as well.”
The water not only damaged the gym floor, but the classrooms as well.
“All the tiling throughout the school had to come up and on the northside they had to redo all of the drywall and take it down to the studs,” Eilerman said. “It wasn’t so much that the water was high, but it had soaked up into the drywall and all of that had to come down. A lot of work went into repairing that water damage.”
Luckily, this damage was covered by insurance.
“There was so much that went into it, not only with the abatement for the asbestos, but then getting the contractor and getting them in on the narrow time frame that we had,” Eilerman said. “We were able to get them in here and get it done in time for the start of school in August. It really wasn’t an ideal situation, but they were able to at least get us to where we could start school on time in August. It was an all hands on deck effort for getting that accomplished.”
However, that wasn’t the case for the gym floor. In order to get the school rooms repaired, all of the desks and everything else was moved into the gym.
“The challenge became, okay, we have to get the stuff out of the school and they decided that we would put it in the gym,” Eilerman said. “So, with that, the gym repair was put on the backburner to get the school taken care of.”
This meant that if the junior high and pee-wee girls were going to have a team this year, they would have to find other venues to practice in and hold their games in.
“After the flood happened, I just immediately started reaching out to people in other school systems and asking if they had ever had anything like this happen to them and if so, what do you do,” Eilerman said. “Then, I got straight into the Athletic Director networking. I started calling the other AD’s and said, here is the situation. I know the schedules are already set and everything, but we have no gym to play in.”
Eilerman said they would be happy to play the games at the other team’s venue.
“I just basically said we would be happy to play at their gym or otherwise we would have to cancel,” he said. “Almost every school was like, yeah, we will be glad to play it here. It was great because that way the kids didn’t lose out on any games.”
The next challenge was finding a place for the kids to practice.
“I reached out to Carrollton’s new superintendent, Jason Bauer and we set up a meeting,” Eilerman said. “I was pretty much like, we will rent the facility or do whatever you want us to do and he was so accommodating and nice and said, well, I would hope that you would help us if we needed help so lets work together and make sure that you guys get some time in the gym and we will go from there. He was amazing to work with.”
In the meantime, Eilerman said he reached out to a couple of other schools to see who they had used for floor replacement.
“Triopia had just gotten a new floor and they had used this company out of Missouri called Missouri Floor and so I got in contact with them,” he said. “Initially, they said they weren’t going to be able to get us in because of the jobs they already had scheduled until mid to late November.”
This meant that there would be no home girls’ basketball games and no eighth grade night and no eighth grade tournament for the girls.
“But, as luck would have it, they had a narrow opening in their schedule and we had everything out of the gym and back into the school and were able to get everything prepped for them to come in and do the installation the first of October,” Eilerman said. “They had it completed by the end of October, which was amazing because he told us it would take probably six weeks to compete. So, he was not only able to get us in early, but also able to get it done in under the time quoted.”
All of a sudden, everything seemed to be falling into place and there was a slight glimmer of hope that the girls might actually get to play on the new gym floor after all.
“It was definitely a challenge, but for everything to turn out like it has was amazing,” Eilerman said. “I contacted Coach (Greg) Pohlman at Carrollton and was able to get this game set up for tonight because they had an opening in their schedule. I wanted the eighth-grade girls to get at least one home game in, if possible.”
They were also able to squeeze in eighth grade night and earlier this week began the annual St. John’s Lady Redbird Eighth Grade Tournament.
“So, at the start of this school year, we were thinking about how we were going to do all of this,” Eilerman said. “We were thinking about how there would be no home games for the eighth-grade girls and no eighth-grade tournament and now, here we sit and we have eighth grade night and next week starts the tournament.”
Insurance took care of the cost of the floor, which came in at a cool $138,000. It will, however, not entirely cover the cost of new bleachers.
“The way the insurance works is that they will cover the cost of removing the bleachers to have the floor installed and replace them back again once it is done, but they won’t replace them with new bleachers,” Eilerman said. “Our bleachers were outdated and needed to go. We are just going to have to figure out how we can cover the shortfall because the insurance will only pay so much since we aren’t putting back the old bleachers.”
Currently, they have two rows of folding chairs sitting where the bleachers were. While he didn’t have an exact cost, Eilerman said bleachers are in the price range of roughly half the cost of the new floor.