SOUTH RANGE - Working through the nights, Lori Sleeman moved along the hardwood floor with nothing but her tools and a design.
It's familiar to her. She trekked back and forth across the large canvas and painted a basketball at one end and then one at the other.
This year was just one of many Sleeman was asked to paint the large wooden floor for the NCAA's Final Four tournament, an honor she said she gets excited about every year.
"They call me in to do the specialty work," she said. "The floor is huge. I was just shocked when they said this one corner is 15-and-a-half feet in diameter."
Sleeman said Mike Schmitt and Paul Lomorand start the project and complete the large-scale work, which includes letters and stripes. Then she takes over, working through the nights airbrushing designs and intricate details.
"This one involved a lot of airbrushing with many, many different colors," she said. "It is a little bit more technical than putting your basic colors down."
The floor is assembled in a huge room at Horner Flooring in Dollar Bay. Sleeman, who works days at the business she and her husband own in South Range, the Wildlife Refuge Cabins, traveled to Horner Flooring every night last week to complete the project.
"My longest shift was eight at night to quarter to six in the morning," she said. "It was a wild and crazy week."
After it was completed, the floor was taken apart, packaged up and shipped out to Houston in time for the Final Four games, which start April 2.
Sleeman said seeing the floor on TV is "exciting and melancholy."
"It's really not a big deal to me, but it should be," she said, laughing. "To think it's from here is what makes it so unique."
Each little square in the picture has blended colors in all different directions from dark to light, she said, making the floor a little more complicated.
"I would have to spray one corner and walk all the way to the other end and do it identical," she said. "I had to walk back and forth, back and forth for each little section. I got a lot of exercise."
Sleeman said she has been working on Final Four floors for about eight years now and every year, the NCAA plans different designs. Once the floor is done being used, it's shipped back, sanded and repainted the next year, she said.
Sleeman, a local artist, mostly works with oil and airbrushing and has painted floors for sporting events as well as snowmobiles and wall murals.