CBS Basketball Court

It is 80 feet long, 46 feet wide and contains 41 cubic yards of concrete. And it will be the envy of every Kobe Bryant wannabe who visits Campus by the Sea this year. It’s the new basketball court.

Phase One of the Waterfront Improvement Project is well under way. Our goal is to install a new full basketball court and redo the two volleyball courts adding fresh sand. The first hurdle was getting all of the material to the island—300 bags of cement, 78 tons of sand and gravel, 250 tons of volleyball court sand, and equipment to handle the products. In January we hired a barge to deliver the supplies along with a propane truck, sewer pumping truck, rail road ties, lumber, and shingles for other projects.

Initially we contacted ten concrete companies from the mainland. Nine were unwilling to sign a contract to send six concrete trucks from the mainland by barge to Santa Catalina Island. The tenth company agreed but then priced the job $20,000 more than what it would cost if we did the task ourselves. So we decided to do the mixing ourselves.

We hired a small crew of four from the mainland plus two concrete finishers from Avalon. In addition we assigned our kitchen staff Christina McCaan and ground’s crew staff Katie Hamman as helpers. The team jerry-rigged a concrete mixing plant in the middle of the fairway. It consisted of two cement mixers, a wooden chute to pore sand into the mixer, an assortment of small buckets to accurately measure water, 100 pound bags of cement, a tractor to deliver sand and a forklift with an improvised bucket to deliver wet concrete to the court area. It took the team six hours to mix the batch on the first day. By the third day they had the process down to less than four hours. By day six the project was done.

Christina and Katie preformed like champs. The process of mixing concrete is not much different than making cinnamon buns, just a different recipe. And the end result of the former will last a lot longer and help our guests burn off the calories of ingesting the latter.