Northeast Ohio's court builders, family owned since 1957.

Seventy years, in four paragraphs

Courts are the business. Tennis courts for schools and colleges, park courts for cities, pickleball banks for everyone, basketball courts from the Flats to the suburbs: built from the stone up on asphalt or post-tensioned concrete, or brought back with crack repair, an acrylic resurfacer and two color coats. We learned the acrylic systems when they were new, joined the American Sports Builders Association, became SportMaster's authorized installer for the region, and had been building and resurfacing courts across Northeast Ohio for decades by the time SportMaster came to film our crew at Kent State. The Oberlin College complex, the Hudson and Strongsville banks and the Parma Heights rebuild are on the project pages with the rest.

Then pickleball happened. Now the calls are for dedicated pickleball courts and for tennis courts converted to them, from cities, park districts, schools, clubs and homeowner associations across the nine counties, and the courts at Hudson, Richfield, Strongsville and Parma Heights are the ones on the home page and the videos page. The surface is the same acrylic, the lines are still hand taped and hand painted, and the siting has a new word in it: noise.

The name says where we started: Industrial Surface Sealer, sealing the lots of the factories, churches and schools of Cleveland's east side at a time when every sealer was coal tar. Courts came because the same owners had courts, and the courts took over. Sealcoating, crack filling and striping are still done every season, about three million square feet a year, by the same crews with the same discipline: clean it, fill the cracks, two thin coats, lines, come back in three years. It is the second business now, and a good one.

What has not changed: one yard, a president who walks every site and writes every proposal, crews that do the whole job, and the knowledge of what a Northeast Ohio winter does to a surface that was rushed. Draft for Carl to correct: the family history, the names and the dates belong here.