Breakaway Goal
From Hoopedia
From a John Deere press release:
Farmers are known for fashioning makeshift parts and even inventions when they see a problem to solve. Arthur Ehrat, an Illinois farm boy and retired grain elevator manager from Virden, Ill., used a John Deere cultivator spring to solve a basketball coach’s problem in the 1970s and changed forever how basketball is played.
Ehrat took an old metal basketball hoop and added a magnet and a John Deere cultivator spring to create what is known today as the breakaway basketball hoop.
The patented idea, nicknamed, "The Rebounder," has become a fixture in gyms, allowing players to dunk more easily without damaging the rim or backboard.
"My nephew, Randy Albrecht, was coaching basketball at St. Louis University at the time, and we were talking about how the players were bending up the rims and breaking bones trying to dunk the ball," Ehrat remembers. "I thought...that ought to be an easier problem to solve than the ones we were having spreading fertilizer and chemical. I went and bought a $20 rim and sat on the porch with it trying to figure out what I could do."
Fascinated with magnets as a boy, Ehrat decided a magnet could be used to hold the rim firmly, but still allow it to break away under pressure. Using a hinge similar to the ones found on the heavy doors at the elevator to make the hoop swing up and down, some bolts and several springs, he worked with a local farmer-mechanic to turn the idea into reality.
Ehrat found that most of the springs he tried were too loose or too tight to bounce back with the right velocity. After giving the problem some thought, he considered how easily the springs on a John Deere field cultivator moved as the equipment bounced through a field, and figured the springs had to have about the right amount of tension. He got a spring from his local John Deere dealership and gave it a try. The rest, as they say, is history.
"I was already familiar with the patent process, because I had applied for and received two patents for equipment changes for spreading fertilizer and chemical," he says. "It took me six years to get the patent for the hoop, but it finally came through in 1982."
In the 17 years it was in effect, Ehrat spent a good deal of time and money defending the patent, which he licensed to nearly every basketball hoop manufacturer. The Smithsonian Institute and each of his seven grandchildren have one of Ehrat's early prototypes. In addition, he loaned his original prototype to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., for display for about four years.
"I don't know a lot about basketball. I did not have time to be interested because of the responsibilities on the farm. Our school gym had no rim or ball," he says. "When I watch games now, I wait for the dunk. I love to watch them dunk the ball."
