On Aug. 28 for its season opener, the girls volleyball team played on its new home court: a temporarily rented sport court located in the fieldhouse.

While the workers were sanding the floor during the first renovation, the contractor noticed that nailheads were popping up “literally in hundreds of spots throughout the whole gym floor.”

District officials and the Board of Education decided that the old gym floor needed to be torn out and replaced with a completely new gym floor with a new substructure and maple.

Athletic director John Catalano said the renovations to the Main Gym began “as soon as the 2012-2013 school year ended.” They were delayed for four months after the expected Aug. 15 date because of nail implications, forcing the volleyball team to play elsewhere.

“The old gym floor was 60 years old, and that’s a long life for a gym floor,” Catalano said.

The original renovations included painting the walls and the ceiling and installing new bleachers. To refurbish the old gym floor, Catalano said the goal was to sand, paint and refinish it.

After the nailhead problem was fixed and the first renovations were completed, the volleyball team was able to play its Senior Night game in the refurbished Main Gym on Oct. 3.

“It was really exciting because we were the first team to step foot in there,” said senior Leah Reinfranck, who played on the girls varsity volleyball team. “It smelled like a new house.”

Reinfranck said the volleyball team was lucky to play in the Main Gym on its senior night, even though it was only one game out of the entire season.

“The Main Gym, while it looked different, it still had the same feel as the old gym,” said Reinfranck. “It was just like, ‘Okay we’re home again.’”

Catalano said after the girls played volleyball on the Main Gym floor, the brand new urethane, a durable and flexible synthetic material, “started to peel and lift off of the floor.” The workers had to completely remove it, so they could install a different type of urethane in the gym and repaint the floor.

The renovations also impacted physical education classes and the boys and girls basketball teams.

Because of all the different facilities available for gym classes to utilize, physical education teacher Michael English said that not being able to use the Main Gym made the teachers be more creative in their lesson plans, which was something that they were “able to handle.”

The second set of renovations delayed the overall completion of the process until December. As of Dec. 10, the first varsity event in the Main Gym was scheduled to take place on Dec. 12 when the boys basketball team is scheduled to take on Maine East.

“It has been an odd renovation,” said Catalano. “And it [has] just not been a good one.”