About Rim & Rebound

What this site is

Rim & Rebound is a driveway-first guide to home basketball. It ranks in-ground and portable hoops on the specs the makers publish (backboard size and material, pole size and piece count, overhang, base or anchor, adjustment) and on what their install manuals actually ask of you (hole size, bag count, cure time), quotes every warranty term from the maker's page with the date we read it, and covers the rest of the slab: rebounders and yard guards, outdoor balls, nets, rims, lights, court lines and chalk. As of launch it covers 36 hoops and 44 pieces of gear across 56 rankings, head-to-heads, reviews and guides, with specs read from 91 manufacturer, manual and reference pages.

It is written for one buyer: a homeowner with a driveway and kids who wants the right hoop for the space and the install questions answered before the crate arrives. So the pages lead with the driveway (how wide, how steep, where the garage door swings, where the ball ends up) and then the catalog, not the other way around.

Who runs it

Mike M., the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media, an independent publisher. Mike writes every page and is the single byline on the site. Iron Mako Media is the publisher and the entity behind the affiliate accounts; more about it is on its own site.

How the rankings are built

From manufacturers' published product pages, their install manuals and installation guides, their warranty pages or the warranty printed in the manual, and public references such as the NBA and USA Basketball youth standards, 811 and QUIKRETE's concrete data sheet. Every spec on a product card links to the page it was read from, with the date. Every hole size and bag count is the maker's figure, quoted. Where a maker blocks fetches or leaves a figure off the page (Lifetime publishes no list prices or base capacities on most product pages; Wilson's site blocked us), we say which dealer page we used instead or we say “not published.” The rubrics and their weights are public on the methodology page.

What we refuse to claim

• Units we claim to have tested: 0. We have not stood one of these hoops up ourselves, and no page implies otherwise. Everyone in this category says they tested twenty hoops; we say we read twenty manuals.
• We don't print Amazon prices. They change daily; every button says “Check price on Amazon” until a live, dated feed supplies a number, and a number older than 48 hours would disappear automatically. We print makers' list prices only where the maker publishes them, linked.
• We don't quote Amazon star ratings or review counts, and we don't mark our own scores up as product ratings in structured data.
• We don't print a warranty term we couldn't read on the maker's page or manual. Where the two disagree (the Silverback SB60 page says 5 years, its manual says 7) we quote both and rank on the shorter.
• We don't list credentials, awards or testimonials, because there aren't any to list.

How the site is funded

Affiliate commissions. As an Amazon Associate, Rim & Rebound earns from qualifying purchases; every Amazon link on the site carries our tag. Commissions never set a score or decide a pick, no brand pays for placement, and the direct-only makers we compare (Goalsetter, Pro Dunk, Mega Slam) pay us nothing; their links are plain and say so. The affiliate disclosure has the full statement and the editorial policy the rules we write by.

How to reach us

By email only: mike@blackironathletics.com, or the contact form. There is no phone number and no street address; this is a publisher, not a store. Corrections are fixed in place and logged on the page.