BY DANIEL SCHMIDT
THE OBSERVER
AUBURN — Walk into Lee-Scott Academy’s gymnasium these days and the first thing you notice is the shine.
The volleyball team is already back on the court, and the freshly sanded and refinished floor, now complete with updated Warriors branding, has given one of the school’s central athletic hubs a fresh look, according to LSA athletic director Clay McCall.
“The biggest thing I knew it was going to do was really just light the place up,” McCall said. “That was exciting, once they finished and got it painted and you saw the lights on it. It’s something our school can be proud of.”
The project was as much about timing as appearance. McCall said the school’s leadership and its head coaches agreed the floor had reached the point where a full refinish made sense.
“You run into a point with the gym floor where eventually you have to decide that OK, is it time to go ahead and sand it all the way down?” McCall said. “We felt like we were at that point right now.”
Crews took the old finish off, brought the floor down to bare wood and reworked the school’s colors and tweaked branding into the surface.
McCall credited the work to Scout Flooring, which handled the project.
He said the transformation was striking to watch unfold, from the initial sanding to a court covered in nothing but flooring tape, to coats of paint that closely matched LSA’s colors.
“It looks absolutely great,” McCall said. “Kudos to those guys.”
A few finishing touches remain. McCall said new molding around the perimeter of the floor is still to be installed, a job that is expected to take only a day or two once it is scheduled.
The gym renovation is one piece of a broader upgrade to the Warriors’ athletic facilities, spanning baseball, softball, football, soccer and the weight room.
McCall said the effort was made possible by donor support, a point he returned to repeatedly.
“We were very, very fortunate with a donor being able to help us get this door opened,” McCall said. “That was such a blessing, to start there with that vision, and to allow us to update our athletic facilities.”
McCall declined to divulge the total price tag of both the court renovation and the broader facility enhancements due to school policies and out of respect for the anonymous donor.
He added that the improvements do more than just modernize the buildings.
For the coaches and student-athletes who use them every day, the upgrades restore a sense of pride, and as a K-12 school that gratification will sweep over a broad swath of the campus community.
The renovation also arrives at a fitting moment as LSA prepares to move into a new era of competition.
In January, the Alabama High School Athletic Association introduced two new private school classifications — Private Class A and Private Class AA, which the Warriors will compete in — bringing in a fresh slate of opponents and communities through LSA’s doors.
Among those new schools are McGill-Toolen Catholic High School, Briarwood Christian, Faith Academy and John Carroll Catholic, all schools that traditionally have hundreds more students and larger budgets than the Warriors feature.
McCall, who spent a decade as athletic director for Auburn City Schools before taking charge of the Warriors, said welcoming those visitors the right way matters.
“I’ve always believed that part of being a classy organization is being a first-class host,” McCall said.
He then pointed to what a well-kept facility signals to anyone pulling onto campus.
“When I ride onto a high school campus, the first thing I look at is the athletic facilities,” McCall said. “When you see those things are taken care of, normally the school goes right with that. You probably don’t have to meet a person in the building yet, but you can safely say this community really cares about what they have here.”
For McCall, that’s the payoff: a floor that shines for the players who practice on it and for every team that comes to visit.
“At the end of the day, this is all for our kids,” McCall said. “We’re just really, really proud of the Lee-Scott community for what the gym looks like.”
