Why sports halls are the hardest rooms to treat
Take a large volume, add a polished concrete or timber floor, block walls, a metal roof deck and a glazed wall, then put 30 people and a bouncing ball inside it. Untreated, a school sports hall typically measures 3 to 6 seconds of reverberation time. A whistle becomes a wall of noise, a coach cannot give instructions across the court, and the room measures dangerously loud at the referee's position.
What you are aiming for
- Physical education and multi-use halls: reverberation time at or below 1.5 seconds in the speech range.
- Competition halls with spectator seating: 2.0 seconds or less.
- Fitness studios, spin and dance rooms: 1.0 second or less - these are small rooms with amplified music, and they are the easiest to fix.
Where to mount, and where never to mount
- Upper side walls, above 3m: the largest available surface and safely out of the ball zone.
- Ceiling rafts over spectator seating: cleans up crowd noise without touching the playing surface.
- End walls above the goal or basket, if the structure permits - these are prime reflection surfaces.
- Never below 2.5m inside the court envelope. Panels there will be struck, and any panel that can be hit will eventually come down.
- Avoid mounting directly across from a climbing wall or a cricket net where balls arrive at speed horizontally.
Products that survive a gym
- 12mm impact-resistant PET felt panels in a protective frame, mounted 50mm off the wall for better low-mid absorption. Link them across as a continuous band.
- Perforated metal-faced absorbers where durability is the top priority - they cost more and absorb less, but nothing gets through them.
- Wood slat panels for receptions, changing-room corridors and spectator concourses, where appearance and durability both matter and impact is unlikely.
Impact noise is a different problem
Absorption will not stop the thud of a ball or a dropped dumbbell travelling to the floor below. That is structure-borne impact, and it needs a resilient layer - floating floors, rubber crumb underlay, or isolated ceiling systems. Read sound absorption vs soundproofing before you specify, because it is easy to spend the budget on the wrong layer.
How much coverage?
Plan on absorption equal to 10 to 20 percent of the floor area for a large hall, concentrated on the ceiling and upper walls. Fitness studios are more aggressive: 25 to 40 percent, because the sound sources are closer, amplified, and the room is smaller. Our polyester felt range covers both cases, and we can supply the mounting frames with the panels.
Send us the hall dimensions, ceiling height, floor material and the activity it hosts, and we will return a coverage plan with panel counts. Request a gym or sports hall quote.