Tourna Mini Ballport Tennis Ball Pick Up Hopper

Had my 10-y/o son assemble it. He succeeded. (So it's easy to assemble!)The only problems that concern:• The panels kind of warp where screwed together;time will tell if stress fractures occur.• The top bars that slide open/closed are stiff;we SLIGHTLY rounded the bar edges used a little vaseline.UPSIDES:• Lighter than metal.• Won't rust.• Folding handles/standing legs.• Holds 11 cans of balls!• Easily decorated/personalized.When we bought it, the price was right. Thus, I recommend.

4.0 club player always trying to improve serve....I like this because it's small. It's like the squared off version of the baskets you use to pick up balls but not even that big. I initially thought i would just get a silver pick up basket and leave it in my car. This turned out to be a bit better because it's on a stand so i don't have to lean over to get the balls out when I'm serving.It was easy to put together, holds a decent amount of balls for single practice and you can put it up, break it down easily. I leave it up in a room in the house. When I think I might stop by the park to serve and work on my pronation, I put it in the trunk and off I go. Sure it's not the biggest ball holder and you don't have a huge cart of 300 balls to continuously serve from....but it's also not heavy, you won't wrench your back or shoulder and you can get out the door in a snap.If you need a bigger item because you want more balls, I wouldn't necessarily suggest going up in size of this type of ball holder. At that point I would get the canvas ball cart that kind of origamis out and is on wheels. It's portable, holds a good amount of balls and at that point I think you get a lot more balls/portability for the money.

I bought this hopper due to its light weight and ball capacity. I'm a casual recreational tennis player and just wanted something to help me practice on my own in-between drills and matches. I also purchased 36 Penn pressureless tennis balls for practice. The bottom roll bars worked fine with both the pressureless tennis balls and regular pressurized ones. It occasionally becomes difficult to pick balls up if other balls already in the hopper become wedged against one another. The hopper holds 36 pressureless tennis balls if you pack them in there tightly -- you may need to make some minor adjustments to the balls to get them to all fit.I like the design of this product but the manufacturing is disappointing. It is clearly a product that is churned out as cheaply as possible with little regard for quality. For example, the handles are meant to lock into place in two different positions for standing the hopper up or using it to pick up balls. Because of the poor manufacturing, the handles don't lock into place solidly. This makes the handles less stable which can result in the hopper toppling over with wind gusts. The low-quality was also apparent while assembling the hopper. The included instructions are very basic and inadequate -- just a little effort here could make it much easier to assemble. Also, while assembling, my hands got what felt like painful fiberglass micro-shards in them. I had to wipe all the parts down with a damp cloth to get the fiberglass shards off of them.Overall, I still recommend this product due to its convenient size and light weight. I wish there was a higher-quality, comparable product -- I would gladly pay a little more for it.

The ballport is well design with good quality. It's easy to assemble. Great product.

Possible THE WORST Assemble Instructions. And poorly made. I'll see if it lasts but would not purchase another product from Tourna.

I bought one of these small ball hoppers two summers ago for my then 52" tall daughter to use, as our larger all-steel, 72-ball Wilson hopper was too heavy for her. The design is great but the quality was so poor that it became non-functional. However, I found I could fix it with minimal home-handyman skills and not too much effort, so my Mini Ballport is once again working adequately.DESCRIPTION:The Tourna Mini Ballport hopper is easy to assemble and takes all of about 5 minutes to screw the sides and one end together, insert the legs/handles, insert the top and bottom rods into the slots on the bottom and grooves on the top, then screw together the second end to secure the whole hopper. The fully assembled hopper weighs about 3-4 pounds and stands 30.5" tall. I didn't specifically count, but I think it does hold just about 36 balls.The legs rotate up easily to form the handles for carrying or picking up balls and rotate down again, locking easily into place to serve as legs. One picks up balls by raising the handle up, positioning the bottom of the hopper over the ball, and then forcing the hopper bottom, which is hollow with two rods running across it slightly narrower than the width of a ball, over the ball, which, when compressed, will fit in between the rods when squeezed, and then enters the bottom of the hopper. In normal conditions, a non-compressed tennis ball will be slightly wider than gap between the rods and won't fall out the bottom.PROS:- Light weight and easy for kids to carry and handle- Holds about the right number of balls for a quick warmup to practice serving- Easy to use- Excellent service from Tourna - I called them to request an extra bottom rod (see below) and they instead sent me entire new Mini Ballport a few days later.- When it's working properly, it works very well.CONS:- Poor overall quality of the plastic sides of the hopper. Whether it is from a materials defect or a manufacturing defect, most of the flat black plastic panels that are screwed together to form the hopper box are warped and bend outward (and unfortunately, one cannot swap them 180 degrees - they are one-sided). This creates a larger gap between the sides than there should be. The two sets of rods (the bottom ones are fixed in place, the top ones fit in a groove and can slide open for use on the court and closed to keep balls from rolling out) are supposed to be held in place by friction and pressure from the box sides fitting tightly. The warped plastic results in the space between the sides being too wide to hold in the rods securely. On my first Mini Ballport, as I was walking to the court, I noticed a ball hitting my leg as it fell out of the bottom of the hopper and when I looked, I saw that one of the rods had fallen out since the warped sides were too far apart to retain it securely. I never found that rod and had to contact the manufacturer.On the second, replacement hopper, the sides were also warped, but not quite as badly as the first. I did not trust the bottom rods to remain in place, so I glued them in and in two years of use, they have been fine. However, I could not glue in the top retaining rods, which need to slide in the groove from open to closed and the distance between the rods was too wide, so sometimes one of the rods would come loose. This spring, I noticed this problem happening frequently and after looking closer, discovered that the plastic on one side at the corners where one screws together the sides had broken off. I will have to glue this back together.- Does not hold enough balls for a typical practice session - I find that when I'm using this hopper instead of my larger Wilson one, I'm picking up balls twice as frequently. However, this is a function of fitting one's intended use to the item's stated specifications, so to be fair, this is really more of a user preference issue than any shortcoming with the product itself.CONCLUSION:I cannot recommend this product to be used as intended by the manufacturer, as the quality of the component sides of the hopper was so low and inadequate. However, I can give it a qualified recommendation if one is willing to forego the possibility of disassembling the hopper for storage and glues it all together permanently. If the rods are securely retained, it works very well for picking up and storing balls..APPENDIX - HOW TO FIX AND OVERCOME MANUFACTURING FLAWS- First, assemble the hopper using just the supplied screws to see how it fits. Maybe you have a better-made unit than the two I got and everything fits securely. If so, I would use something like Gorilla Glue, to glue into place the two bottom rods so they won't fall out.- If your hopper side and end panels are at all warped, I'd glue the hopper panel edges together, too, immediately prior to screwing the box together. This will strengthen the overall construction and it will be less likely that you will suffer the broken corner piece where the screw hole is located, as I did.- If you have lost a rod from your hopper, take one of the other rods out, take that rod to your local hardware store, and buy a length of brass pipe the same diameter as the rod to make a replacement rod (a wooden dowel might not be strong enough in that diameter). I think I paid something like $2-3 for the pipe. I measured a length on the pipe to be slightly longer than the stock rod for added security, cut it with a hacksaw, and then glued it into the bottom of my first Mini Ballport, so I now have two fully functioning Mini Ballport hoppers. If you lost a top rod or the rods are not long enough and keep falling out because your side panels are warped, maybe add a good 4mm - 3/16" of extra length or even more to the length of the replacement rod you are cutting, and the longer replacement rod should not fall out of the groove.