Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an excellent Basketball goal, at a very fair price. Once completed, you have an attractive basketball goal that looks like it means business...and it does. The goal's design is fairly heavy duty, and holds up well to fully grown people hanging briefly from the rim, along with the other expected abuses a hoops goal goes through. It adjusts easily, and is well-balanced, so that two people can relocate the goal without trouble. Filled with 407 pounds of sand (use DRY sand to speed this cumbersome process), the thing stays put once positioned, also. All-in-all, the finished product is very satisfactory, and I expect it to provide many years of healthy fun for my family. Now for the headaches: Amazon says the goal will be shipped in its original packaging. The packaging is simply not up to the job, and my friendly Fed-Ex delivery person said that items of this size and weight that aren't given extra packaging rarely make it to their destination intact. In my case, the box had split open, and spilled several of the pipes comprising the pole, along with several of the hardware packets. (I notice from the other reviews that missing hardware is a frequesnt complaint.) Luckilly, my Fedex guy was able to gather the spilled parts, and nothing was lost or damaged. While Lifetime offers a toll-free number to obtain missing parts, it would be frustrating to have to wait for an essential part once assembly had commenced. The other headache was the assembly instructions. Clarity was sacrificed in order to make the instructions as short as possible. Many steps could have been broken down into several sections, and illustrated in more detail. There was no complete parts list, and some of the pictures of parts were inaccurate or mislabled. There also seemed to be no order to the way the hardware was packaged. I consider myself very handy, but I was frustrated with these instructions, and ended up improvising a lot of the assembly. Consider the assembly a MAJOR PROJECT with poor instructions from Lifetime. In the end, I am quite pleased with my new basketball goal and would reccommend it to others as long as one is aware of the potential headaches associated with shipping and assembly. The price is right, the free shipping very convenient, and the finished product looks GREAT, and plays well. 6-23-2010: Two years later, and the system is still in excellent shape. It's been played hard, been exposed to extremes in temperature and weather for two years, and hasn't deteriorated in any noticeable way. I'd say this makes it an even better buy.