Updated August 2026 · Sangola (Solapur), Maharashtra
ChampCourts built a 7,200 sqft basketball court at Fabtech Public School & Jr College, Sangola (Solapur), Maharashtra: snap-fit PP interlocking tiles over a new M20 PCC base cured 28 days before surfacing, with the school's initials inlaid in tile. Indicative ₹200–210/sqft ex-GST on base and tile supply. Get a free itemised estimate →
What did ChampCourts build at Fabtech Public School in Sangola?
A 7,200 sqft outdoor basketball court in the main courtyard of Fabtech Public School & Jr College, Sangola, in Solapur district, Maharashtra. The surface is snap-fit polypropylene interlocking tile laid over a new M20 plain cement concrete base, marked in white to FIBA basketball geometry, with the school's FPS initials inlaid in contrasting tile.
The footprint is the standard one. A FIBA playing area is 28 × 15 m, about 4,600 sqft of live court. Add the run-off a school actually needs to play safely and you arrive at 120 × 60 ft, or 7,200 sqft, which is what was laid here. The tile is 304.8 × 304.8 mm, one foot square, so the court is a grid of 7,200 individual pieces. The colour scheme uses that grid: a red surround, a blue playing field, green blocks at the key shoulders, and the letters F, P and S set into the blue in red tile. Nothing is painted onto the surface except the white marking set. The colour is the tile. The court occupies the school's central courtyard, framed by teaching blocks, with the older murram play area continuing beyond its far edge.
What was on the ground before the court went in?
A bare, uncoated concrete courtyard. The slab between the school's teaching blocks was patchy grey plain cement concrete with no marking, no colour and no sport on it. Usable as a yard, not a court. Beyond it, the school's play area was compacted red murram.
This is the situation most Indian school buyers are actually in: there is concrete, and there is nothing on the concrete. The courtyard is framed by teaching blocks on three sides and opens onto the murram playground on the fourth, so the court had to sit inside a fixed rectangle. There was no option to move it, rotate it or grow it to suit a drawing. The slab itself was cast for this project as plain cement concrete to M20 grade over a 70 mm granular sub-base, in line with IS 456:2000, the Bureau of Indian Standards code for plain and reinforced concrete, and left to cure 28 days before anything went on top of it. Everything that follows in this story is a decision taken on that fixed rectangle of concrete: its size, its fall and its finish.
Why interlocking tiles on a school courtyard instead of acrylic?
Because a school courtyard is outdoors, gets monsoon rain, and takes a full day of feet. Polypropylene tile drains through its own open grid instead of shedding water sideways, carries a 5-year warranty against acrylic's 2, and can be repaired one tile at a time rather than recoated.
An acrylic system is a bonded coating: layers of acrylic polymer built onto the slab, seamless and consistent underfoot, and genuinely the better answer for a court that will be played on competitively. Its weakness at a school is repair. Damage a coated surface and the fix is a recoat, which means shutting the court and waiting for dry weather. PP tile is the opposite trade. Every 1 ft × 1 ft piece is independent, snap-fitted without adhesive or tools, so a damaged tile pops out and a new one goes in. The open-grid face is fully permeable, which matters on an unroofed courtyard in Maharashtra. Shock absorption, ball behaviour and slip resistance are the properties that separate sports surfaces. They are the same properties that EN 14904 sets thresholds for on multi-sports surfaces. Tile is engineered for impact reduction on joints, and UV-protected for colour fastness outdoors. Expected life is 15 years and up.
Can interlocking tiles go over a concrete slab you already have?
Usually yes, if the slab is sound, level and drains. Tiles are laid loose and snapped together, with no adhesive holding them down, so they follow the concrete underneath rather than correcting it. A slab that ponds water will still pond under tile. A slab that is cracked and moving will telegraph.
That is the whole survey question for a tile job, and it is worth being blunt about, because it is the single biggest reason a tile quote changes after a site visit. The grid drains vertically. Water goes straight through the tile face. Where it goes after that is decided by the fall built into the concrete, not by the surface. At Sangola the base was not inherited. ChampCourts cast a fresh M20 PCC slab over a 70 mm granular sub-base, laid to level with drainage fall, and let it cure the full 28 days before surfacing began. Where a school already owns a slab, the survey checks three things: whether it holds water anywhere, whether it is flat enough that tiles seat without rocking, and whether existing cracks are dormant or live. A sound existing slab removes ₹90/sqft of base cost from the estimate.
How many kerbs and corner pieces does a 7,200 sqft tile court need?
1,440 kerbs and 4 corners. The arithmetic is fixed: perimeter = 2 × (L + W); kerbs = perimeter × 4; corners = 4. A 120 × 60 ft basketball footprint has a 360 ft perimeter, so 360 × 4 = 1,440 kerb pieces, half male and half female, plus four corner pieces at the four corners.
Get this line wrong and the estimate is wrong by a lot. The common error is to read "kerb" as "one per running foot" and quote 360 pieces for a basketball court. That understates the requirement by 1,080 pieces. At ₹25 per kerb (male and female cost the same), the difference is ₹27,000 ex-GST on a single court, and it surfaces on delivery day when the edge runs out three-quarters of the way round. The same formula scales down: a 52 × 25 ft badminton court has a 154 ft perimeter and needs 616 kerbs; a 60 × 30 ft pickleball footprint has a 180 ft perimeter and needs 720. Corners are always four, universal pieces at ₹15 each, with no male or female distinction. If you are comparing tile quotes, this is the fastest integrity check available to you: multiply your own perimeter by four and see whether the number on the page matches.
How do you get a school's initials into the floor?
You lay them, rather than paint them. In a snap-fit field every 1 ft × 1 ft tile is an independent unit of colour, so a letterform is set out on the grid and built from tiles of a contrasting colour. At Fabtech, FPS is built in red tile across the blue playing field, readable from three storeys up.
This is a thing tile does that a poured or coated surface cannot do as cleanly. On acrylic, a crest or a set of initials is paint applied on top of the finished system. Another layer, with its own wear life. On tile the letters are the surface. They cannot scuff off, because there is nothing on top to scuff. The resolution of the letterform is one foot, the size of a tile, which is why the shapes are blocky and why they read cleanly from three storeys up. Stock tile colours run to ten: red, green, yellow, grey, blue, dark blue, orange, golden yellow, light green and dark green. Certain colours are subject to availability and made-to-order shades carrying a 14-day lead time. Because nothing is bonded, the graphic is reversible: lift those tiles and the letters change.
How did the court go in, stage by stage?
Four stages, and almost all of them were photographed from the same window of the school building. Cast and cure the base. Lay colour trial patches on the bare slab and look at them from above. Snap the tile field down, inlay included. Mark the basketball geometry in white, last.
Stage 1: base. M20 plain cement concrete over a 70 mm granular sub-base, laid to level with fall, cured 28 days. Stage 2: colour. Sample tiles in several colours are laid out on the finished slab and looked at from above, because a colour that reads well in a hand-sized sample can read very differently across 7,200 sqft in Maharashtra sunlight. Stage 3: tile. The field is snapped together over the cured slab, surround, playing field and the FPS inlay, with the perimeter closed by kerbs and corners. No adhesive is used anywhere in this stage. Stage 4: marking. White sidelines, keys, three-point arcs and centre circle go on last, to FIBA dimensions, once the field is complete and square. Marking goes last on any court: it needs a finished surface to sit on and a square field to measure from.
What does a 7,200 sqft PP tile court cost?
On our published rate card, roughly ₹14.4–15.1 lakh ex-GST for the M20 base plus tile, kerb and corner supply on a 7,200 sqft court, about ₹200–210/sqft across those lines. Installation, transport and any slab repair are quoted separately after a site survey. GST at 18% is extra.
| Line item | Specification | Quantity, 120 × 60 ft footprint | Indicative rate, ex-GST |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base | Plain cement concrete, M20 grade, 70 mm granular sub-base, laid to fall | 7,200 sqft | ₹90/sqft |
| Base cure | Cure time before any surfacing begins | 28 days | — |
| Surface | Polypropylene interlocking tile, 304.8 × 304.8 mm, snap-fit, open-grid drainage, UV-protected | 7,200 tiles | ₹105–115/sqft supply |
| Perimeter kerbs | Male and female, half of each — perimeter 2 × (120 + 60) = 360 ft, kerbs = 360 × 4 | 1,440 pieces | ₹25/piece |
| Corner pieces | Universal, one per corner, no male/female distinction | 4 pieces | ₹15/piece |
| Line marking | White basketball set to FIBA dimensions — 28 × 15 m playing area within the 7,200 sqft footprint | 1 set | Quoted per court |
| Warranty / life | PP interlocking tile | 5-year warranty | 15+ year expected life |
Read that table as a checklist rather than a quotation. Two lines move the total more than anything else. The first is the base: if a school already owns a sound, level, draining slab, the ₹90/sqft base line disappears and the same court lands nearer ₹110–120/sqft on supply. The second is the kerb count, which is where under-quoting hides — 1,440 pieces against a quoted 360 is ₹27,000 of daylight. Two costs are deliberately absent from the table because they are site-specific: installation and transport to a location like Sangola, and any levelling or repair an existing slab needs before tile can go on it. Every rate here is indicative and ex-GST. Final cost depends on site condition, location and scope, which is why we survey first and quote line by line rather than pricing per square foot over the phone.
What does the school have now that it didn't have before?
A marked, colour-coded, permeable 7,200 sqft basketball court where there was a bare grey slab, carrying a 5-year tile warranty and a 15-year-plus expected life. The before and after photographs on this page were taken from the same position, months apart, and nothing else in the frame changed.
Two things are worth naming, because they are what a buyer is really deciding between. The first is that the footprint is not committed to one sport for its life. 7,200 sqft comfortably contains an 18 × 9 m FIVB volleyball court or a 13.4 × 6.1 m BWF badminton court, and a second marking set can be added later without touching the base or lifting the tile. The second is that this court was delivered to Sangola, in Solapur district — not to a metro. ChampCourts operates pan-India from Hyderabad; materials, crew and supervision travel to site. There is no branch office in Sangola and we do not claim one. What we claim is on this page, photographed at each stage. Every image here is a ChampCourts site photograph of this project — not a render, and not a stock picture standing in for one.
FAQ
Do PP interlocking tiles need a concrete base?
They need a sound, level, draining hard base — usually concrete. Tiles snap together and lie loose on top with no adhesive, so they follow whatever is underneath rather than correcting it. At Sangola we cast a new M20 PCC slab over a 70 mm granular sub-base and cured it 28 days before laying tile. If you already own a slab that is flat, dormant and does not pond water, it can be reused, and the ₹90/sqft base line comes out of the estimate.
How many kerbs will my tile court need?
Multiply your perimeter by four. Perimeter = 2 × (length + width); kerbs = perimeter × 4, half male and half female; corners = 4. A 120 × 60 ft basketball court has a 360 ft perimeter and needs 1,440 kerbs. A 52 × 25 ft badminton court needs 616. A 60 × 30 ft pickleball footprint needs 720. Kerbs are ₹25 a piece ex-GST whether male or female; corners are ₹15. If a quote shows one kerb per running foot, it is short by three quarters.
Can you put our school's name or logo into the court?
Yes, on a tile surface. Because every tile is a 1 ft × 1 ft unit of colour, letters and simple marks are built into the grid out of contrasting tile rather than painted on top — which is how FPS sits in the blue field at Fabtech Public School, Sangola. The resolution is one foot, so blocky letterforms read best. Ten stock tile colours are available; certain colours are subject to availability and made-to-order shades have a 14-day lead time.
What does a PP tile basketball court cost in Maharashtra?
On our rate card, PP interlocking tile is ₹105–115/sqft supply and an M20 PCC base is ₹90/sqft, both ex-GST, with kerbs at ₹25 a piece and corners at ₹15. For a 7,200 sqft court that works out around ₹14.4–15.1 lakh ex-GST on those lines, or roughly ₹200–210/sqft, before 18% GST. Installation, transport and any slab preparation are quoted separately. These are indicative figures — final cost depends on site condition, location and scope, so we survey the site and quote every line separately.
How does a tile court handle monsoon rain?
The tile face is an open grid, so water passes vertically through the surface instead of sheeting across it, and the court is playable again quickly once the rain stops. What happens next is decided by the concrete underneath: the fall built into the slab is what carries water off site. That is why the base is laid to level with drainage fall, and why a survey checks an existing slab for ponding before we agree it can be reused.
Can the same court be marked for another sport later?
Yes. A 7,200 sqft footprint holds a 28 × 15 m FIBA basketball playing area with run-off, and is large enough to overlay an 18 × 9 m FIVB volleyball court or a 13.4 × 6.1 m BWF badminton court on the same tile field. A second marking set can be added without disturbing the base or the tiles. Overlaid markings are best planned at survey stage so the colour scheme and run-offs suit every sport you intend to play.
