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Basketball for One

Talk to Glenn Hudson for just a few minutes and you’ll learn he truly and completely loves the game of basketball. “I came from a family where my dad didn’t want me to waste my time playing sports. Even though I started both my junior and senior years in high school, he didn’t ever see me play until after the whole town was going crazy over our team’s success.”

For the small Illinois town called Gibson City, winning the state games back in 1972 was a very big deal. Now, years later, Glenn has taken that love of basketball and created an invention that may help train future b-ball stars.

Learning early on that shooting hoops over and over again was the secret to sinking those basketballs, Glenn has scored with the “shootAndstar Rebounder,” which attaches to a standard backboard. It enables a lone basketball player to practice shooting easily. Shoot from any place on the court, and both made and missed shots are quickly returned to the shooter.

Glenn remembers, “Our team’s star player, Dennis Graff, led the state in scoring and ended up getting a full-scale scholarship to the University of Illinois. One night before a regular season game, Dennis took me with him to a gym in a small town nearby, and we took turns rebounding for each other, rapidly passing the ball back to the one shooting for another shot. We did this for a couple of hours, and I remember that I was so confident about my shots before the game that I told one of my teachers, Jim Clemons, I was going to score a lot of points that night. I scored 26 points, the most ever, and the headlines were ‘Graff Cold, Hudson Hot in Gibson Win.’ Dennis scored 20 points but, as he pointed out to me, he still got the first headline.”

Before coming up with shootAndstar Rebounder, Glenn developed and obtained a patent on a multisport backstop that let sports enthusiasts in golf, softball, soccer, football, and other sports practice their game alone. The device got picked up by a company called Sportime, Inc. “Each time I called the representative about the product, while they were preparing to manufacture it, he told me what a great product it was going to be. Eventually he told me that the overseas engineers couldn’t overcome some engineering problems, and they weren’t even going to manufacture the product. At the time, I didn’t have the energy level or means to continue forward with the product.”

Glenn was down, sure, but not out. You see, Glenn rebounds quickly. One morning, about 3 a.m., he woke up with the idea for a new invention. “With the experience under my belt of my prior invention, it was a lot easier to get through the prototype stage. I came up with improvements, and this time decided I wasn’t going to wait for some large corporation to mess things up.”

Since everyone, including his wife, Pat, had gotten so excited about his first invention, friends and family all took a “wait-and-see” attitude. At first, sales for shootAndstar Rebounder were terrible, so much so that Glenn thought of calling it a game. But he kept remembering a story he heard about the inventor of the shopping cart.

According to Glenn, when the shopping cart was first invented, no one wanted to use it. People have trouble making changes, and everyone was used to bringing their own baskets into the store. So the inventor paid people to push shopping carts around the store, taking things off shelves and putting them into the carts. Other people saw them and eventually started using shopping carts, too.

Anyway, over time, sales of shootAnd-star Rebounder keep picking up. Glenn has now sold units to customers in almost forty states, a couple in Canada, and as far away as Australia. “I did make some mistakes with my initial inventory of shootAndstar Rebounders that I had manufactured. But none were so glaring that it wasn’t still the best shooting practice device in the market for the price.”

These days, Glenn is working on a new one-size-fits-all shootAndstar Rebounder with a company that manufactures products for such companies as Mattel and Fisher Price. “It will be a better product, with a lower cost, and won’t take as much money to ship. After spending very little money in marketing and having initial success, I know that one day soon you will see the shootAndstar Rebounder in every neighborhood in this country and throughout the world!”

He shoots, he scores … and he takes over the world.