How to Ensure the Safety of your Ceiling-Suspended Basketball Backstops
Basketball backstops are a key feature to any gym. But they can also cause a lot of damage to your facility and athletes if they are not properly installed and maintained.
Basketball backstops can weigh close to 1000 lbs, and they are suspended 20 to 30 feet above the air on average. If one of these units were to fall, they would cause thousands of pounds of force on impact. The damage to the facility and the people below would be detrimental.
The majority of backstops do not have a fully automatic safety strap to ensure the security of the system and they are not regularly inspected. This can cause damage to the systems to go undetected, and without any proper safety measures installed, this could put the safety of the facility at stake.
Even regular inspections may not be enough. Sometimes there is no visible damage to the system, like a loose or worn components. A faulty limit switch can cause the basketball backstop system to fall. The limit switch determines how far the system can travel down. When the switch is not set properly or fails to perform its job, the winch could pull the system past its safe travel distance causing intense pressure on the whole system. This pressure stresses the supporting hardware and it substantially increases the risk of the backstop system falling.
Accidents may occur, even with regular inspections and maintenance. The only way to guarantee the safety of the facility is to install a fully automatic safety strap
like the Aut-O-Loc. The Aut-O-Loc system eliminates the uncertainty of a backboard system failing, and it prevents serious injuries that could result from a falling system. It also protects the facility from thousands of dollars of damages.