We had a basketball hoop in our backyard when I was growing up and spent untold hours out there playing ball. It was the nexus of our block. In fact, I have a memory of spotting the ball for my brother Matt @ the foul line and I seem to recall him sinking 100 in a row. It could be a false memory, but it was certainly quite a few, and he definitely has the hand-eye coordination to do it.
*Anyway*, we thought Malcolm would love a place to shoot hoops too, so we put up a hoop (and a fence panel to keep the ball from bonking the neighbor’s car) in back. My neighbor Doug had a rusty old, super heavy-duty steel backboard from a city park which we sanded down and repainted, and we sunk a 6x6” cedar post for the welded mount on the backboard and added a bamboo fence panel to match the rest of the yard.
The backboard weighs a ton so we put a sheet of plywood across my neighbor’s pickup bed as a scaffold and bolted the backboard onto the pole. Luckily the holes we drilled lined up: It’s positioned at 8’ 3” now while he’s small and there are holes to move the backboard to 10’/regulation height in a few years once he’s older.
Sure enough, Malcolm loves it and plays out there nearly every day after school, and the neighbor kids are using it too which is great.
My dad did most of the work on this.. thanks dad!
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