Outdoor Handball Court

DEAR TIM: My husband and I are planning to construct an outdoor handball court on the grounds of our home in central New Jersey. We are having difficulty finding information on how to construct the wall for our court. We are building the one-wall style court. The dimensions of the wall are: 16 feet high and 20 feet wide. Can you provide information as to whether we should use concrete block or poured concrete? Jean and Don Pollock

DEAR JEAN: You can read my past column on Poured Concrete vs. Concrete Block Foundation Walls for the details, but the bottom line is you can use either material to build the wall. I would think that concrete block would be the better material to use as a good block layer could get the playing side of the wall in a uniform plane with great ease.

You can't say the same thing about poured concrete unless the poured wall contractor was using brand-new forms. If you look at poured walls closely, you will frequently see waves, bumps, lines where the panels touch and other imperfections. These high spots will cause the ball to bounce off the wall in an unpredictable fashion.

The first thing you need to do is check with your local zoning authorities to see if you can even build a wall this tall. Some zoning codes would never allow such a thing.

Your biggest concern is wind load on this wall. I am quite sure it will need to be an engineered wall that very well may have steel or masonry buttresses on the back side that will help prevent the wall from blowing over. Undoubtedly the wall will have horizontal and vertical steel reinforcing rods and if you do use concrete block, the cores of all of the block will need to be filled with cement-based grout or pea-gravel concrete.

The wind load during a hurricane or even a severe thunderstorm could blow over a tall wall like you plan with relative ease. You would be shocked to discover how much pressure is on large flat surfaces on a windy day.

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