Rubber Flooring for Hockey Skates - St. Croix Sports Testimonial
By Created: September, 2019 - Modified: December, 2022
Related Product: Rubber Flooring Roll Geneva 3/8 Inch Regrind Per SF
This sporting good store offers equipment and apparel for everything from football to baseball, softball to Lacrosse. But hockey is where this retail facility really excels.
“We have a large focus on hockey,” Coffey says, noting that come the fall of the year St. Croix Sports sharpens a lot of skates - up to 100 pairs a day. “That’s a main part of our business in the fall - skate sharpening, skate repair, skate sales, stick sales, apparel sales - from different universities to colleges to high schools to youth programs.”
As is the case in most retail environments, when he set up his business, he found himself with concrete floor. But concrete and ice skates don’t mix.
“You can’t walk on skates on concrete,” he said. “It would damage the steel on the bottom of the skates, potentially even the boot. It would just destroy the steel. So you need a rubber flooring, plastic flooring or real ice.”
Recognizing that those last two options aren’t exactly a good fit for a retail environment, he began price shopping online for rubber flooring and found Greatmats.com to have better pricing than everywhere else he found and opted for Greatmats 3/8 inch thick regrind confetti rubber flooring rolls.
“The installation of it was very easy - no gluing, just unroll the mats,” he said.
Coffey also noted, “It doesn’t damage the steel at all.”
An added benefit that he hadn’t considered was the ease of cleaning.
“It was very easy to clean with a mop and soap and water,” he said. “That’s been a big bonus for us. So far, in six years... it hasn’t changed a bit. It holds up very well to foot traffic and actual kids walking around in skates off and on.”
In fact, it worked so well that St. Croix Acceleration - an adjacent business focusing on performance training for high school, college and professional athletes - including for hockey - ordered the same recycled rubber flooring for its facility in 2017.
“They have kids walking around on it, running on it, standing on skates,” Coffey said. “It’s held up very well. You can’t even notice that people walk on skates. It doesn’t chip away. It doesn’t dent.”
In addition to the great rubber flooring he received, Coffey says Greatmats’ customer service was of equal quality.
“I have nothing but a positive experience with Greatmats,” Coffey says. “Everything they told me would happen happened. It was delivered on time. They said it would be easy to lay down, and I was nervous about that. But in reality, it was very easy to install the flooring on the floor inside my store.”
Sean Coffey
St. Croix Sports
Hudson WI 54016
