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Sunday, February 8, 2009

To Use the State Shape or Not?

One decision a state university faces in decorating its basketball court is whether to use the shape of the state in the design, or not. I personally like depictions of the state, but some schools have gotten rid of them. The University of Tennessee is one such school (current on the left, old on the right).


(I found the photo of the current Tennessee court here, and the one of the old court here; I enlarged the old photo to emphasize the shape of Tennessee at mid-court.)

I'll try to find examples from other schools, to post in the future

7 comments:

  1. The recent years' college basketball video games provide almost always accurate evidence of college basketball courts' designs.

    I do not have the most recent game (NCAA Basketball 09) but I did purchase each years' 2KSports game and enjoyed seeing the various courts, especially the low and mid-majors' teams' courts that are not shown regularly on television.

    In fact, if you are interested, I previously compiled descriptions/comments about each Division I school's court design from College Hoops 2K8, including whether there was a large center court logo, whether the key and/or two-point area was painted, any logos and/or words on the court and baselines, etc.

    Matt R.

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  2. Texas A&M uses an enormous depiction of the State of Texas. It is done using different toned wood from the rest of the floor

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  3. Matt,

    Please feel free to share your compilations in future comments!

    Stu,

    Thanks for the mention of A&M's court at Reed Arena with the huge shellac-painted Texas. A picture is available at the following site. The writer rips the A&M court design pretty badly, but you should take that in stride, as it's from a Baylor blog!

    http://bearmeat.blogspot.com/2007/02/agricmeat-weekend-sweep-predicted.html

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  4. If you provide me with an e-mail address we can start a dialogue about my compilation.

    Also, off the top of my head, one school's court that stands out is Northwestern (LA) State, there are flames painted on the court from the baseline into the 2 point area, excluding the key. There are also wordmarks on the court that say "Demons" and "Lady Demons", this may be the only school with separate wordmarks for the men's and women's teams' nicknames (excluding Tennessee, which has both the men's and women's team's logos on the court).

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  5. UNC-Chapel Hill uses a picture of the state of NC as well.

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  6. My e-mail address is: alan.reifman@ttu.edu (which is also available via the link to my faculty webpage at Texas Tech).

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  7. If I didn't know any better I'd swear TAMU made the state outline that huge as a knock on UT, which has a smaller outline on their center.

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