‘The College at Braintree’ is situated on the edge of the vibrant market town of Braintree North Essex and is part of Colchester Institute. The has a thriving sporting community and wonderful sports facility.
Mark Lloyd is a Lecturer in Sport at Colchester Institute and leads their Basketball Academy and other sporting activities at the College. Mark has a vested interest in the sports facility at Braintree as he also manages the Great Britain Under 20 Men’s Basketball Team who use the college as their training facility. The staff have the remit to develop players for the ‘next level’ and in particular the Men’s Olympic Team.
During June of 2011 it was decided to use the Braintree facility as the official training venue for team GB to allow them to train for their forth coming European Championships being held in Sarejevo, Bosnia. To make the venue more prestigious the decision was also taken to invite Belgium and Denmark to Braintree and hold a mini European basketball tournament prior to leaving for the main competition.
Mark was keen to ensure the venue was as state of the art as possible and new goals were installed for the event. Mark also wanted to install the new FIBA style basketball court and contacted Sportsafe to carry out this work.
The timescale from being contacted to having to carry out this work was less than three weeks to the date of the tournament. Mark Lloyd takes up the story;
“ as is normal with this type of work funding and bureaucracy can slow things down which left us with quite a tight timescale. Once we contacted Sportsafe and they visited the site to take a look at the situation events began to happen very quickly. Sportsafe came in with a very competitive price which was accepted and they managed to ensure they altered their existing schedules to ensure we had the court laid in time for the tournament. The tournament was due to start on a Saturday and Sportsafe engineers arrived to commence work on the Monday prior to this. All work went according to plan and Sportsafe finished the marking a day ahead of schedule. The court markings looked great and really complimented the other equipment at the facility. Team GB were over the moon with the new facility and this was a great boost to morale. We at Colchester Institute, The College at Braintree and Team GB would like to thank Sportsafe for helping us to make the facility a top quality venue worthy of use by the national squad”
