ASB turned a frontrunner in squash courtroom manufacturing and maintained this place for many years, together with a mid-2000s introduction of a brand new glass-based floor and glass enclosure setup that’s turn into the usual for squash competitions worldwide.
Christof joined the corporate to succeed his father as CEO in 2012, and ASB started specializing in LED surfaces. The primary such product was a easy flooring show referred to as “ASB Multisports” that might swap between markings for numerous hardcourt sports activities like basketball, volleyball, and handball. By 2015 the corporate had additionally developed “ASB Lumiflex,” the fuller LED show courtroom I dribbled throughout in Orlando.
The corporate shifted focus to gaining official approval from FIBA, the world’s governing basketball physique, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, and it succeeded in 2022 when FIBA modified the principles for official allowable enjoying surfaces to incorporate glass along with conventional wooden. ASB’s first official FIBA occasion was the under-19 Girls’s World Cup in 2023.
Latest shopper installations embrace European basketball groups Bayern Munich and Panathinaikos, each of which have performed all their house video games throughout the 2024-25 season on ASB courts; NBA All-Star Weekend 2024 in Indiana, which utilized ASB for a number of occasions together with the dunk and three-point contests; the College of Kentucky’s “Massive Blue Insanity” occasion in 2024; plus a number of different professional and collegiate groups or amenities throughout a number of sports activities.
Business and fan engagement alternatives abound with this expertise, which opens the courtroom up as a large clean canvas. A number of the time, the floor seems similar to a conventional parquet enjoying floor, with reasonable photos of wooden panels. All of the sudden, although, it may possibly remodel into one thing else.
When free throws are shot throughout a basketball recreation, for example, most gamers are likely to spend 45 to 60 seconds standing on one facet of the courtroom. ASB purchasers can use the accessible area on the opposite facet of the ground to, say, present a graphic on the shooter’s free-throw proportion—with an accompanying model companion’s emblem proper alongside it.
“This floor has allowed us to utterly reimagine how we join with followers and the way we ship worth to our business companions,” Thanos Bichtas, head of promoting for Panathinaikos, tells me in an e mail. “Whether or not it’s dynamic intros with customized courtroom animations, or reside visible results that react to large performs, we’re now providing a stage of visible storytelling that transforms the world into an interactive expertise.
Bichtas says the courtroom has turn into a high-impact platform for model visibility. “And crucially, it doesn’t disrupt the fan expertise; it enhances it.”
Infinity League, an indoor soccer league with groups from Germany and Italy, makes use of the glass floor to juice up the motion. Photograph courtesy of ASB GlassFloor
Ground Workouts
On my go to, I used to be proven a set of kid-friendly actions that might flip these courts into academic hubs throughout college hours, from numerous scale renderings of dinosaurs and sea creatures to a characteristic that lets youngsters design mazes to run by way of. Bichtas says Panathinaikos has already used its ASB courtroom to host a variety of occasions, from model activations to basketball talent clinics for followers—youthful ones particularly. Christof, a Go-Kart fanatic, envisions a complete racetrack setup on one in all ASB’s courts within the close to future.
“If you happen to have a look at an enviornment’s infrastructure, it prices someplace round 250 to 350 million Euros,” Babinsky says. “If you happen to put our flooring in there, that’s nearly 1 p.c extra of the general price range. However having that flooring in there’ll enable the world for use way more usually, as a result of instantly you don’t have an enviornment used for a house recreation each two weeks. No, you possibly can have youngsters in there Monday morning.”
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