Steve, Cathy, and Nicholas -- Nicholas buys and builds his own basketball hoop (created 2010-06-08)

We have a new basketball hoop at our house and Nicholas provided part of the money and part of the labor. Here's the story of how it evolved.

I think basketball hoops are ugly and would just as soon avoid putting one in at our house. But Nicholas loves basketball and really really really wanted one. We worked out a deal. He would provide half of the money out of his savings account as soon as the total balance in his account was above $200. We would provide the rest.

Now we want to encourage Nicholas to save, so if he puts any money into his savings account, we'll match it. He gets $7 a week in allowance but we're generous in offering more money if he does extra chores above and beyond what's normally expected. Sometimes he fritters all his money away on cheap toys, but there are times when he tries to put away every penny he earns.

We found a nice portable basketball goal, but it required substantial assembly. Nicholas helped out with a lot of the work, though we did have to caution him several times about safety issues. His favorite job was whacking things with a mallet.

Here's the assembled basketball hoop with future Jayhawk star Nick Simon taking a shot.

What now?

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Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2017-06-15.