Thursday, August 30, 2012

Long Beach State's eye-catching court


College basketball has seen a revolution recently in non-traditional court designs, plenty of which are proving to be far too garish and brash for many of the fans’ taste.

But one college who seem to have struck the right balance between the two extremes is Long Beach State, where the court design is distinctive without being intrusive or overdone.

Since its campus is located three miles from the shoreline and its teams wear "The Beach" on the front of their jerseys, Long Beach State decided to give its basketball court a palm tree-themed makeover. Four palm trees frame the court, each in gold to reflect the look of a Southern California beach.

This “themed” floor also makes sure that we are not going to see an end to the unusual court designs in college basketball anytime soon. Perhaps we have Boise State and their blue gridiron to blame for starting the trend which has infiltrated basketball over the last two seasons.

There have been so outlandish designs not least these three headed by Oregon who in 2010 unveiled an orange and tan fir tree-lined court floor, Towson University elected last summer to give its basketball court some orange watermark tiger stripes before Cal State Bakersfield  last autumn topped both of those by installing an all-blue court – whether these designs have a positive effect on their ncaab results remains to be seen.

Long Beach State's design could have been as outlandish as any of those had the 49ers adopted one of the other proposed looks. School administrators and basketball and volleyball coaches considered 10 designs during the past 10 months, most of them beach-themed, although one design that was considered was to go with an all-black court.

The one the 49ers chose has received almost exclusively positive reviews so far from fans, media and players, although the floor won’t actually see any ncaab scores from the men’s basketball team until Nov. 10, when they take on North Alabama.

No comments:

Post a Comment