We recently told you about the Amasa company behind the Final Four floor. Turns out it has a U.P. neighbor — and Horner Flooring in Dollar Bay has been making the courts basketball’s biggest moments happen on since the game itself was born.
Wait — There Are TWO?
A few days ago, we told you about Connor Sports in Amasa, the tiny U.P. town that’s built the NCAA Final Four floor since 2006.
Then a reader set us straight in the comments: there’s another one.
A couple hours northeast of Amasa, in the Copper Country town of Dollar Bay, sits Horner Flooring. And Horner doesn’t just make basketball floors — it’s been making them longer than just about anyone alive, anywhere on earth.
So no, the U.P. doesn’t have a basketball-floor town. It has two.
Older Than The Rulebook
Here’s the stat that stops you cold: Horner has been making hardwood sports floors since 1891 — the same year Dr. James Naismith hung a peach basket on a gym wall and invented basketball.
Let that sink in. The U.P. has been making the floors the game is played on for as long as the game has existed. There was never a version of basketball without a U.P. connection.
Horner is a founding member of the Maple Flooring Manufacturers Association, bills itself as the oldest continuous maker of sport floors in the world, and says it’s laid down more than 11,000 gym floors across the country — from a town of a few hundred people in the Copper Country.
The Floor Under The NBA’s Biggest Nights
Horner’s portable court — the ProKing — is the one the NBA reaches for when it needs to drop a world-class floor somewhere far from home.
2025 marked the 40th straight year Horner’s floor was the chosen court of the NBA All-Star Game. When the league opened its 2025–26 season with games in Vancouver and Macau, Horner’s crew was on-site laying the boards. The ProKing has been packed into shipping containers and shipped to the Summer Olympics, to military bases, and to arenas on the far side of the planet.
Horner likes to put it this way: if a memorable moment happened in basketball over the last fifty years, there’s a good chance it happened on one of their floors. From most companies that’d be a stretch. From Dollar Bay, it’s just about true.
The Spartans Bought The Floor They Won On
If you want the Michigan moment, here it is.
When Michigan State won the 2000 national championship — Tom Izzo’s first title — the Spartans were playing on a Horner floor. They liked it enough that, as Michigan Country Lines reported, MSU bought that portable court from Horner and kept it for its own use.
A title won on Dollar Bay maple, then hauled home to East Lansing. Izzo, an Iron Mountain kid himself, summed up the whole improbable thing best. “You wouldn’t put the U.P. and basketball together for being famous,” he told Michigan Country Lines. “But when you think about it, it makes some sense.”
Two Towns, One Sport
So here’s where it lands.
Amasa builds the floor the Final Four is decided on. Dollar Bay has floored the NBA’s biggest nights for forty years and helped invent the whole category back in 1891. Two specks on the U.P. map, a couple hours apart, quietly making the single most important surface in a sport watched by hundreds of millions.
Most of the country has no idea. A lot of Yoopers don’t either — until a neighbor mentions they drove past the Dollar Bay plant every day for years.
The next time the NBA tips off, or One Shining Moment plays, or a buzzer-beater drops at the Final Four, the floor came from up here. Probably from one of two little towns most people couldn’t find on a map. That’s about the most U.P. thing there is.
Did you know Dollar Bay made basketball floors too? Tag a Yooper who has no clue the U.P. has been flooring the game since 1891 👇
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