Newark High School, NY

Schools often ask what they can do with their running track to make it stand out or look like their own, different than the track at a rival school.

The recent trend in track design has been to offer exchange zones in different colors. This is a cost-effective, highly attractive way for a school to have a unique track, and exactly what ATT Sports did recently for Newark High School in Upstate New York.

Thanks to a great design from Gordon Jones, a Buffalo-based architect, Newark is now the proud owner of a red track with grey exchange zones. The track is a new Spurtan BV “sandwich system” with an encapsulation layer and custom “Home of the Reds” logo in one of the two D-zones.

The contrasting exchange zones look fantastic, but they do come with a lot of extra work for an installer. The zones need to be measured and placed precisely, requiring additional surveying and hand work. As the installer, we needed to build the grey sections first, then the red, making sure to protect all the edges and create seamless transitions between colors.

The result is not just beautiful, but useful for the runners, creating an area in which to hand off the baton during relays that is more distinguishable.