The sports committee meeting lasted two hours and forty minutes, by the principal's own account. On one side: the cricket coaching staff, who had been asking for a proper pitch surface for three years. On the other: the basketball programme, which had just produced two players shortlisted for inter-school district trials — and needed a regulation court before the tournament in six weeks.
The principal made a call that both sides initially viewed with suspicion: both. The school's 11,400 sqft sports area would carry a basketball court at one end and a cricket pitch at the other. Two surfaces. Two different systems. One phased project that had to deliver Phase 1 within 18 days or the basketball team missed their tournament.
Our proposal was straightforward: build the basketball court first, completely, before a single roll of cricket turf is unloaded. The cricket coaching staff were not happy about going second. But they understood why.
The Challenge
Two different sport surfaces on one campus — that is not primarily a construction challenge. It is a sequencing, logistics, and stakeholder management challenge. With a hard deadline sitting right in the middle of it.
The basketball court needed PP interlocking tiles on a prepared base. The cricket pitch needed artificial turf with a shock-pad underlayer and infill. These two systems could not overlap or share any materials. The boundary between them — a 6-foot buffer zone that would eventually become a walking pathway — had to be marked from Day 1 so neither installation touched the other's sub-base area.
The deadline pressure was real and there was no room to slip.
The inter-school basketball tournament was confirmed for Day 22 of the project — four days after the basketball court handover was due. That gave the school's PE team two days of practice before hosting. If we handed over on Day 19 instead of Day 18, that buffer shrank to one day. Day 20 and it was gone entirely.
We assigned a dedicated site supervisor to the basketball phase whose only job was the Phase 1 handover date. The cricket pitch team was kept on standby in Lucknow from Day 15 — present but idle — so Phase 2 could start the morning after Phase 1 handover with no mobilisation delay.
There was one more complication. The 11,400 sqft plot had been used as an informal playground for years. Sub-surface compaction was uneven — our site team found two patches in the cricket end where the soil was soft enough to need additional compaction before any base work could begin. We caught this on Day 1 ground assessment and sorted it before the basketball base pour started, so it did not delay Phase 2 later.
The Solution
We mobilised a crew of eight for Phase 1 — double the usual team for a basketball court this size. The logic was simple: a larger crew in Phase 1 creates margin. If you lose a day to weather, a material delay, or a base complication, a bigger team can recover those hours by extending the working day rather than slipping the handover date.
The basketball court was designed in Blue PP tiles — a colour the students had themselves voted for during a short survey the principal ran the week before work started. That survey was the principal's idea, not ours, and it turned out to be smart stakeholder management. Students who had voted for the colour started arriving each morning to watch the progress with genuine personal investment in what was being built.
When the students voted for the court colour, something shifted. They stopped seeing it as a construction project happening near them and started seeing it as their court being built. The energy on campus changed from that day forward.
— The Principal, Lucknow schoolThe cricket pitch used a 40mm artificial turf pile with a 10mm shock pad — right for a school using the surface for both practice and occasional match conditions. The turf was laid with a polyurethane adhesive seam system and sand infill applied in two passes to reach the correct playing surface firmness. Line marking covered the popping crease, return crease, and batting crease in white boundary tape.
The Build — Phase by Phase
The Result
Phase 1 was delivered on Day 18. The basketball team had their court four days before the tournament. They used that time well. They won their first home-court match of the season. The principal sent us a message that evening. Two words, with a score attached. Those two words were "Thank you."
Phase 2 was handed over on Day 35. The cricket coaching programme started the following Monday with a full batch of students who had, in the principal's words, "been waiting since 2021." In the first academic year after both surfaces were complete, the number of students on sports scholarships had doubled — driven by performances at inter-school tournaments in both basketball and cricket.
The buffer pathway between the two surfaces became something no specification document had planned for. The school placed two benches there, and it became an informal gathering spot for players waiting for their court time. Some things just happen on their own.
All project photographs shown are representative illustrations. The institution's name and individuals' identities have been withheld to protect client privacy. Timeline data, court dimensions, and financial figures reflect actual project records. Outcome data (scholarship numbers, tournament results) is based on information shared by the principal over the subsequent academic year.