When we bought this house, there was a broken basketball hoop on the property back in the cul-de-sac. It seemed like a great location to play, but the hoop was unusable. When we tore up the yard, we took out the hoop and threw it away.
Once it was gone, I noticed that more people were driving through the yard there as they turned around in the cul-de-sac. I decided to put a new poll back in roughly the same place.
I bought a Lifetime 71525 hoop from Amazon (yay for free shipping with Prime) and it sat in my garage for about five months before I finally got around to installing it. That should have been a pretty straightforward process, but as soon as I started digging, I discovered that my brand new irrigation lines ran right through where I wanted the pole to go. That meant I had to dig the hole even bigger and make a detour in the pipe. After that, the concrete went pretty easy but it was tricky to keep the pole perfectly vertical while the cement set up. Assembly of the hoop was more complicated than I expected, but I finally got it worked out after a little modification to the lifting mechanism.
The hoop has been up for a couple weeks now and it works well. Elijah loves to have it lowered down to 7.5 feet so I can lift him up to dunk the ball. The cul-de-sac makes a nice playing surface except that the road slopes down to the curb a bit so shots that go through the hoop usually fall down to that part of the road and bounce back into the yard.
Hopefully this hoop provides us with years of fun! Or at the very least, it will hopefully cut down a little on people driving through the yard in that spot.