DribbleUp Smart Basketball Review

For a long time, there really wasn’t a good way to measure dribbling performance and to enhance your skills other than freestyling by yourself or in practice. DribbleUp has made practicing at home a lot more fun and productive with their basketball and app combo. Btw, I do have a couple affiliate links in here, which means I may get a small percentage if you actually buy something. Just to be fully upfront, it doesn’t matter either way, we bought it and just want to help other people make an informed decision. My oldest son loves it so far.

Setting DribbleUp Basketball Up

It’s a pretty easy process to get the whole thing working. Basically you:

• create an account on a computer (for some reason you can’t do from the app which is annoying)
• download the app
• log into the app. Either sign up for the monthly classes (first month is like 99 cents) or use the included drills (I highly recommend the classes, much more indepth)
• put the tablet or phone on the stand and start dribbling!

It will say though that the height of stand is not ideal. It’s great for tracking the ball but not so great for watching the action honestly. The height makes sense for soccer when you’re looking at your feet. I’ve got a video below which shows it in action during a class:

Basketball Feel

How does the basketball feel? Well, it kind of feels a little heavier than a normal ball, and doesn’t quite bounce as good as like a Wilson Evolution basketball. It just something to get used to, and as you can see in the video, after a while it doesn’t slow you down at all.

Classes

The coolest thing about this whole deal is the fact that you can take live or recorded classes from a variety of instructors who also measure your performance. You can go through the drills, and after every class you can see how you stacked up compared to everyone else in the class. I’m sure there are a few people who might be ‘cheating’ to get to the very top, but you can kind of see where the actual top performers are (which gives a good goal to shoot for).

They have beginner and advanced classes, along with freestyle and classes which also focus on specific hands. My son likes the advanced and freestyle classes the best, the beginner ones are too easy for him. The videos in this article are from the advanced class, here’s another example below:

Would I recommend the DribbleUp Basketball?

Absolutely, if your child is motivated at all and has time. If they’re in practice all the time, it might be too much. But if they have a lot of free time in the off-season or after school, it’s a great 15 minute add on to do. Each class is 10 to 20 minutes, so not too much of a time sink. I’m sure they messed around with different lengths till they determined that was the optimal length. Cost is around $10 a month, so not too bad IF you use it quite a bit. Like I would probably discontinue it during the season, but then re-enable it during the offseason.