“It’s a blessing and a curse.”
That’s how a parent described HomeCourt’s ball-handling training experience during the pandemic.
The blessing: kids had a way to stay active and train their ball handling at home.
The curse: dribbling a basketball indoors is loud. Very loud.
Is there a solution to this?
Go outdoors.
But outdoors isn’t always available.
Quiet Basketball
Well, what if the basketball could be quiet?
Ever since silent basketballs became a thing in 2023, we’ve been monitoring the materials. For a long time, they just weren’t good enough.
The breakthrough happened earlier this year when I had a sample sent to our office.
That’s it.
Right weight. Right bounce.
Now, we just needed to dial it in.
Because it’s a training ball for younger players, the right size is Size 6. We tried different weights. 550g felt best. The channels need to be the right depth for grip. And the channels need to be painted in our signature Nex teal.
Of course, there has to be a Nex logo and Nex’s signature thoughtful packaging.
It’s a Nex production, after all.
Yeah, we made a basketball.
And just like the first batch of Nex Playground, we made 5,000 of them.
We sent a few to our friends at the NBA. They were surprised by the quality.
Introducing Nex Quiet Basketball. Available later this month!
Better Camera
But that’s only half of the fix.
We knew from day one that the HomeCourt ball-handling training experience would be much better on a big screen.
When you walk far enough back for a phone to track your body and the ball, the screen becomes too small to give you proper feedback.
Nex Playground is the other half of the fix.
The journey wasn’t exactly smooth.
First, our ball-tracking computer vision model was originally trained to work on Apple devices. We had to adapt it to work on Playground.
We tried and tried. Improved the model with more data.
Still not good enough.
Why?
Motion blur.
The AI couldn’t see the ball clearly enough.
Can we fix motion blur?
Yes, we can.
The solution is in the camera firmware.
This is where owning the whole stack, end to end, becomes a true blessing.
Hardware. Camera. Firmware. Operating system. Developer kit. Training experience. Basketball.
With HomeCourt, we controlled only the app.
With Nex Playground, we can work across every single piece of the experience.
Very few companies in the world are vertically integrated enough to solve a problem like this.
Nex is one of them.
This is the result, comparing the old firmware with the latest firmware.
We’re updating every Nex Playground with the new firmware as part of PlayOS 1.13 by mid-September.
Shortly after, we’re launching Training Ground, an athletic training app on Nex Playground, designed to help families get more ready to play sports in the real world.
In 2026, we can finally deliver the experience we wished we could build with HomeCourt in 2020.
No curse.
Just blessing.
All this work just to address a piece of customer feedback from 2020?
Yes.
Is it worth it?
Yes.
Basketball has been around for more than 100 years. Kids were learning to play it long before Nex existed, and kids will still be learning to play it long into the future.
Sounds like a use case worth addressing if we want to build a 100-year company.
If Nex can participate just a little bit, so some kids get a little more interested, build a little more confidence, and learn a few more skills to play basketball for real, then we’ve made a small contribution to a sport we love.
Great things take years to build and perfect.
The builders at Nex have the patience.
I love it when a brand seizes opportunities to solve his users problems from the same domain but in a totally different product category. it strengthen the brand and actually makes sense. I always says, people think the low-sugar cereal competes with the high-sugar cereals, because they are on the same shelf, and belong to the same category, but in fact, they compete on budget with other low-sugar products. Someone who wants low-sugar products, isn't contemplating on whether to buy the low or high sugar cereal, he is thinking whether to buy low sugar cereal or low sugar yogurt/granola, etc.