KESHENA — As you watch how your bracket picks go, you should know there’s one team that’s guaranteed to go all the way to the Big Game: The Menominee Tribe.

You’re probably thinking, sure, the tribe has some decent ball players, but there’s no way they’re fielding a team for that level of play.

OK, that’s fair, but members of the tribe are still beaming with pride, because when the Final Four take the floor, well, it’s the Menominee Tribe’s floor that the Final Four will take to.

Every scrap of wood on that floor at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis will have come from tribal lands and will have been milled at Menominee Tribal Enterprise’s sawmill. And, by the way, MTE is supplying a large percentage of the wood for the women’s Final Four floor in Florida, too.

“I tell my friends, ‘When you watch the Final Four – and it’s watched globally – that comes from your backyards, guys,’” said Joe Besaw, sales manager for Menominee Tribal Enterprises.

“It’s fun to see something like that at the national level. It makes a lot of people here proud.”

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It’s not the first time. MTE lumber has been at many NCAA tournaments. But only once before, in 2012, has the tribe provided 100 percent of the wood.

Why the NCAA needs a brand new, virgin gym floor every year is anybody’s guess, but it’s good for lumber mills like MTE.

Connor Sports of Amasa, Mich., actually produces the floors for the NCAA, and technically Connor owns them and just leases them to the NCAA. The company specializes in gym floors, tennis courts, indoor running tracks, all of that, and they’ve been NCAA’s go-to gym-floor builders every year for the last 12 years, said Connor lumber buyer Conrad Stromberg.

Menominee Tribal Enterprises is just one of many of Connor’s lumber suppliers, Stromberg said. MTE most often can’t supply enough for the entire floor — more on that in a minute — but this time, MTE and Connor partnered to do the whole thing as well as part of the floor for the women’s Final Four.

'The forest comes first'

So, how much wood is involved in a 70-by-140 foot gym floor?

“I’d say maybe 60,000 board feet,” Besaw said.

He guessed that was about 200 trees, depending on their size.

And now you might guess why MTE can’t always supply all the hard maple the NCAA needs. But if you guessed that it’s because the tribal forest is too small, you’d be wrong.

The Menominee own 220,000 acres of forest, which they call the largest single tract of virgin timberland in Wisconsin. True, it’s not all hard maple, but even so, the tribe has tons and tons of hard maple, along with pine, oak, fir, and just about any other kind of timber used in various types of construction.

What the tribe doesn’t have is an excess of greed. It has been practicing sustainability for 160 years, and it has gotten so good at it, it has more standing timber now than it did back then. Scholars and professors and research groups come to the Menominee to learn how to sustain forests, not the other way around.

The tribal forest is divided into something like 200 management sectors.

“We go into each section every 15 years,” Besaw said. “So if we’re in one section this year, we won’t go back in for another 15 years.”

If that section happens to be hard maple and suddenly everybody in the country wants to put in a new gym floors, you might think the tribe will mow down huge numbers of hard to get in on that action.

Nope. The tribe cuts out sick trees, dying trees, trees that are maybe clumped too closely together for their best health. That’s it. Think of it as a grooming of the section, not a harvesting, and you’ll have some idea of the tribe’s forest management philosophy.

“We have beech scale coming, and that and some other diseases are affecting the beech trees … Emerald ash borer is affecting the ash trees,” Besaw said. “You’ve got to look at those, and you need to put those into your forestry practices also. It’s like your garden at home: you take out the weeds, the bad, so the good grows, and that’s what we’re doing. The forest comes first; our sawmill comes second.”

But the sawmill can manage its lumber supply to allow it to squirrel away enough maple to do an entire gym floor every now and then.

It works pretty well. The tribe has harvested more than 2.5 billion board-feet since 1854, the equivalent of removing all of its standing timber almost twice over.

Buyers may be motivated by the tribe’s sustainability practices, but it’s also just some pretty fine lumber.

37 tons

“It’s first grade flooring, the highest quality,” Stromberg said. “That means there are no defects in it. It’s a whiter color, but color is a preference, and some like a lot of brown in it. For the NCAA, we do first grade. It’s not perfectly white, but it has no defects.”

The floor for the men’s Final Four, to be played in Minneapolis, is a portable floor. Only 37 tons, so it can be carted right off. Connor has used the Menominee lumber to build 397 panels, each 4x7 feet and weighing 188 pounds, that are numbered and lettered so they go together right.

Connor sent off the panels to a finisher, in this case to a company in Ohio, where workers do all the sanding, sealing, painting.

“The logos can be pretty intricate, sometimes as many as four colors, and then they put two coats of finish on top of that,” Stromberg said.

After the tournament, Connor puts the floor up for sale. The take-away is that the floor will be taken away.

“The winner of the tournament has first dibs to buy it,” Stromberg said. “Some do. They’ll use it for their home court, if they need a court. Some teams have made samples, cut it up, put their logo on each piece and distribute them as souvenirs.”

Sometimes a team entirely uninvolved in the tournament could end up with it.

That’s Menominee lumber potentially ending up anyplace in the country, which is no surprise to Besaw.

The Milwaukee Bucks practice on Menominee hardwood, and their affiliate, the Wisconsin Herd, plays on Menominee hardwood in its home arena, the new Menominee Nation Arena in Oshkosh.

MTE also wood is going into new gym floors this spring at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The LA Clippers play on MTE maple.

MTE often sells lumber to China, Besaw said.

OK, OK, already. What about the NCAA?

Besaw liked Duke. Stromberg, being from Michigan, favors Michigan and Michigan State.

Anybody know whether any of those teams needs a new gym floor back home?