Painted Court Lines

The general process for painting court lines on your driveway or concrete playing service is:

1. Clean and prep the surface.
   You can use a pressure washer or a regular garden hose hose with a stiff brush and cleaning agent to clean the surface. IF necessary you’ll want to fill cracks with a high quality exterior-grade patching compound.
2. Stencil the surface
   Once the surface is cleaned you can lay tape or use a stencil to mark the lines you’ll be painting. Cheap stencils can be found on Amazon for $150 or less. Bear in mind, you get what you pay for. The cheap stencils will not have an adhesive to hold the stencil down. Our experience is that even a very mild 3-5 mph wind can wreak havoc on those types of stencils.
   We use a tape applicator to lay down painters tape to the concrete. This ensures the stencil will stay in place and give us a consistent line. We typically do one pass with the tape applicator and then do another pass over the tape to press the tape as deep as possible into the cement. We do this because concrete isn’t a precisely flat surface like drywall. As a result, we’ll often see some level of paint bleed under the tape. 

Paint
With the stencil/tape lines in place the painting becomes fairly straightforward. Using a high quality concrete street paint for best results. Concrete paint is designed to adhere well to porous surfaces and to withstand harsh weather conditions we’ll see in Iowa.
We recommend going with a matte paint in a darker color. While concrete paint is designed to be UV-resistant to protect against fading, having a darker color paint is best.

In short, a dark ( typically black ) colored concrete street paint. If doing a multiple sport application, oftentimes black and white are used. 

Concrete paint is designed to withstand harsh Iowa winter and summer weather conditions, adhere to concrete and be UV-resistant to fading.

Our starting fee is $750 for painted lines of a full three point basketball court. That includes the three point line, and full lane. If we’re adding multi-sports such as a pickleball court, there will be additional costs.

Using a basketball court line painting kit is a great way to get really frustrated and spend a crazy amount of time. It’s kind of like playing golf without hitting a single good golf shot. You spend 5+ hours in the sun and heat and don’t even get one shot in the sweet spot. You just sweat and cuss a lot and vow to never do that again. 

Seriously, proceed at your own peril. Painting line kits can seem like a great way to save time and money. However, in our experience, painting lines with a kit you buy off Amazon is a MASSIVE pain in the rear end. 

Why?

First timer bias. If you don’t do something regularly it takes you time to get the hang of it. Having to place the stencil and have it held down by rocks or other weighted objects is unbelievably frustrating. You set a rock on the stencil to hold it down only to have a mild wind gust pick up the stencil and ruin your whole setup.

Second, concrete is a porous surface. Even with painters tape pressed down into the cement surface we’ll get some bleed outside ( under ) the painters tape. This is amplified greatly with stencils that are not adhered to the concrete. 

We’re not just saying that because it’s good for our health. If you want to buy a cheap basketball court line painting kit off Amazon and paint court lines on your driveway, be our guest. We have personal experience with painted line kits and would like to save anyone else from that experience. 

When we first started painting lines we started with a cheap(ish) stencil only to spend unnecessarily frustrating hours trying to get a good quality painted line. The end paint was not the level of quality we’d want on our own driveway so we had to touch it up and it took the better part of the entire day.