BROOKSVILLE, Maine — In the spirit of not letting anything go to waste, people in Brooksville have long found new uses for things that have outlived their original purpose—a leaky dinghy becomes a giant flower pot, old tires now buttress a mailbox, or worn-out lobster traps get stacked to form a town’s Christmas tree.
Now, on the Cape Rosier side of town, Ron Corl, a furniture craftsman, is helping the National Basketball Association get into the repurposing act by designing wood products from NBA court floors.
“They found me,” Corl said, describing an NBA subsidiary business known as NBA Labs. “They help small businesses that don’t have the big money to partner with the NBA.”
At the time, 2019, Corl was running his own business constructing and selling golf-themed furniture in Ohio. NBA Labs spotted him on the internet and wanted his help reusing portable basketball court flooring used in a 2011 All-Star game played in Los Angeles.
“Once that flooring is installed three or four times, it’s not thick enough for games,” Corl noted.
Corl’s current assignment requires cutting up the court flooring used by the NBA in the 2024 All-Star game, played in Indianapolis, into approximately 50,000 2-inch-square sections.
“They are going to be individually boxed and sold in Walmart, hopefully by February 2025,” he said.
One of Corl’s biggest challenges is finding help with the woodworking.
“When I was in the middle of Ohio, I was near the biggest Amish community in the United States, and I had plenty of workers,” Corl said, although he has been able to get help from a neighboring couple down the road, for which he is very grateful. “But I’ve pretty much been working seven days a week since July to get this work done.”
The 65-year-old woodworker described one of his early NBA wood court projects: cutting thousands of pieces of purple and gold laminated sections of the flooring for an artist who used computer pixilation technology to make a 12-by-12-foot wooden mosaic portrait of Laker great Shaquille O’Neal.
“We hung it up in Las Vegas on a huge easel I built. It was amazing,” said Corl, who also used his precision equipment to shave thick sheets of NBA flooring into ultra thin wood veneers for cigar humidors and mobile phone cases.
New to the area, Corl and his wife, Susan, a weaver, accepted internships in 2023 as resident stewards at the Good Life Center near Harborside, the abode of the late back-to-the-land advocates Scott and Helen Nearing.
After a spring, summer and early fall tending gardens and looking out onto Orr Cove, the Corls decided to relocate from Ohio. The couple now rents a house just down the road from the old Grange Hall on Cape Rosier Road. The town of Brooksville agreed to rent him shop space for three months in a nearby town garage that also houses a mid-20th century fire truck, sharing space as the NBA project marches toward completion.
This story appears through a media partnership with the Penobscot Bay Press.
