After spending nearly the entirety of summer break repairing Pittsburg High School’s gym floor, the process is just about finished.

“Well, it was a long summer,” administrator Jeff Staley said. “The floor has now been repaired, it’s just a matter of letting it cure.”

Unfortunately, the process took much longer than intended. According to Staley, the floor was estimated to have finished repair by the end of May, and early into June. It took more than two months of extra time for the gym floor to reach its completion stage. 

“August 17th was when they had completely finished working on the floor,” Staley said.

At this point, the only question was why it took so much more time than was originally intended. The simple answer: COVID-19.

“It was my first project post-pandemic, and before, if you ordered something, you knew that it would take three to five days to ship so you could plan accordingly,” Staley said. “Until things settle down, we do not live or work in a society where that is always the case.”

The additional time it took to finish the gym floor also cut into some of the activities that viewed our gym as a necessity. 

“The first two weeks of our volleyball season had to be moved, and over the summer there were several youth camps that we had to move,” Staley said.

But regardless, administrators and coordinators still found viable alternatives while the gym was still undergoing repair.

“We had to move the [youth camps] to the Megan Mallet, or to the Middle School,” Staley said. “We had them, we just had to move where we had them.”

But when you disregard the timeframe, what’s important is that the repair was finished without too many setbacks. This, Staley attributes to the teamwork and communication  between workers and administrators. 

“The biggest piece of it is teamwork; making sure you communicate,” Staley said. “The process has a lot of moving parts, but as long as everyone is communicating, it works out pretty well.”

That doesn’t mean that a working process comes naturally, however. Staley recognizes that one thing he learned from this experience is how to be patient with workers, and with colleagues.

“Sometimes, it takes months to get something in. And that’s a very complex situation, not one that can be fixed by changing vendors or getting wood from somebody else,” Staley said. “That was the biggest thing that I learned: when we have future large projects, I’m going to have to be more patient.”

And even though things may be different from the way they were before, Staley and the rest of the administration team knows exactly how to handle the situation, if it were to ever happen again.

“Large projects are different now,” Staley said. “But that’s fine, we’ll all adjust.”