Hello FIRST!
Offseason competitions recommend (or require, not sure) mats or some form of protective flooring. We are interested in looking into hosting an off-season competition at some point in the next years, however I can not find any sort of flooring. Our location advisor would not let us preform without any protection. I’ve noticed a lot of comps use a brownish protective floor. If someone could point me to some good flooring or that specific flooring, that’d be great!!!
In Michigan, all events are required to use 4x8 sheets of Hardboard to cover the area underneath the playing field carpet. Roughly 64 sheets are required to cover the entire playing field area.
Ask your host facility where they keep the gym floor tarps. Just about every offseason I’ve been to just uses those, and no other protection. If they need extra, see post above this one.
Don’t you also need to cover the pit area?
Same thing, tarps work there too.
Ok! I guess I’ll need to talk to them.
At our events, we put tarps down covering both the field and pits gyms to prevent any mess. The hardboard is only required in places where robots are driving on the floor, due to the possibility of robot wheels grinding down through the gym floors (it happened at least once at some event, the entire floor had to be replaced, it wasn’t cheap). The tarps are more to prevent any mess.
Depending on the venue, it’s possible they may not already have tarps for covering their gym floors (ours didn’t). If that’s the case, you’ll need to invest in some tarps. We were able to get a pair of 120’ x 80’ tarps that cover most of the floor in our gyms, then we just used smaller tarps to cover the rest.
Look into something called Ramboard. It’s used in construction.
At FiM St. Joe we tarp everything, carpet the entrances/exits, and hardboard under the field & practice field.
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Can that be used in replace of the hardboard or tarp? Both?
Mr. Wallace, that is looking like my best option. 
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