Gadget Nation. FastPencil Premiere
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pyramid and the opponents don’t catch it.
So far, about 275 Trangleball kits have been sold to YMCAs, summer camps, even prisons. Recently, Mark has shipped some as far away as Australia and New Zealand.
Mark pushes Trangleball every chance he gets. “I’m the pied piper for it, and I’d like to recruit more pied pipers to make this game grow.” At least one pied piper is influencing an entire nation. “A few years ago, a recreation student from the Czech Republic did his entire thesis on Trangleball, he loved playing it so much on Fire Island. At first, his professors wouldn’t accept it as a serious idea, but he was so persuasive, he earned his doctorate based on this thesis. In 2001, he invited me to his university, where I helped him introduce the game to recreational educators.
“I’m really a shy person. I had to make a speech in front of 1,000 people in the University’s gym with the governor and the mayor present. I had stage fright. Now, I’m making speeches all the time to promote this game.”
Working this angle full-time for the past four years, Mark is on fire about promoting Trangleball. “This game has given me a reason to live. Before, I was directionless. Now, there’s a sense of destiny for me. The journey I’ve been on has made the whole thing worthwhile.”
He’s aiming in a clear direction to raise the profile of Trangleball and sell the licensing rights to it. “If it takes off, I know I’ll always have security teaching and coaching it. I’d like to see a big company manufacture, market, and distribute it so more people can play.”
Right now, Mark is having a ball promoting his game. But he knows he’ll have scored big when Trangleball becomes a household name and a game played on every corner.
shootAndstar Rebounder™
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.
SwingSrite™
In the Swing of Things
Up and down and up again. Shirley Rhoades had always loved swinging in a swing. It was a lifelong joy. But when she got osteoporosis first in one hip, then the other, swinging became painful and then unbearable. It looked liked Shirley’s days of swinging were over. She was down, but not out. Shirley’s husband, Dorman, knew there had to be a way to get his wife swinging again.
Dorman Rhoades studied the problem and took a swing at the solution. He designed and built a wooden swing with an adjustable steel subplatform for Shirley’s feet. On this platform is a treadle controlled by the feet, which serves to take pressure off a swinger’s back. He used a special airplane cable and made adjustable seat slats out of white oak. By the time Dorman was finished, his swing was so unique he could tout fourteen patent claims on it.
With this design, the swinger’s feet generate the swinging movement. “The treadle is so sensitive, it can be moved with slight movements of the toes. The platform has a rolling action in the metal undercarriage under the wood. It changes the center of gravity and made it possible for Shirley to relax and swing for hours, even before