Neuroswing personal ball dispenser – lightweight, portable backsaver for driving range practice

The golf equipment landscape is rife with gadgets, gizmos, and gimmicks of all sorts – all accompanied by claims that they will cure your slice, give you more distance off the tee, help you make more putts, etc. Few, if any, are designed solely to make your practice sessions easier—despite the importance of frequent practice in keeping your golf game sharp.

The Neuroswing ball dispenser (www.neuroswing.com) is one device that is designed specifically to help you practice. The Neuroswing’s inventor, Claude Pommereau, suffered from back pain, and the constant bending over and straightening up to tee up balls limited his ability to practice. After extensive research and development, M. Pommereau developed the Neuroswing, a personal ball-dispensing device which eliminates that repetitive strain on the back.

Lightweight and easily assembled, the Neuroswing consists of a tripod base with a pivoting dispensing tube, topped by a rotating ball magazine. The Neuroswing holds 42 golf balls, funneling the balls into six slots in its rotating magazine from a collapsible, flower-petal-like basket at the top of the unit. Balls are dispensed by reaching out and pulling the dispensing tube toward you with your club; as the tube pivots out the next ball in line clears the built-in stop, dropping down the tube to the mat or turf. When you’ve emptied a slot in the magazine, you rotate the next one into place and keep going.

The Neuroswing personal ball dispenser puts 42 golf balls at your disposal with no bending over to tee up the ball.

My prototype Neuroswing came with four flexible tees, ranging in height from 1 inch to 2-1/2 inches, which are designed to poke up through the hole in a range mat. The tees are just like the tees that you normally find at a range, only the Neuroswing tees are equipped with a flexible, molded-in stop which prevents the ball from hopping off the tee when it is dropped from the dispenser.

I took the unit to the range at a local course with mats, set it up, filled it with golf balls, and popped a tee up through the hole in the range mat. This course has pretty thick mats, so I had to use the longest tee that came with the unit, and while it set the ball at a good height for my driver swing, some of the “tee it high and let it fly” types might be wishing for a taller tee.

There’s a red dot sticker on the main tube which indicates the proper height at which to set the unit, but that will vary depending upon the height of the tee you are using. It took a little bit of fussing with the height adjustment to get the ball to land on the tee and stay, and a few misfires happened because the ball dropped hard enough to flex the stop out of the way and hop off of the tee, but in general, once it was set it operated very smoothly.

I’ll tell you, it sure was nice to just reach out, pull the dispensing tube and drop another ball onto the tee, rather than bending over and teeing up a ball every time. Even though my range time with the Neuroswing was centered around evaluating its operation, I found my attention focusing on my golf swing and not the product I was testing, because I didn’t have to think about the Neuroswing—just reach out, pull the tube, drop a ball, and hit it.

The unit which I tested is an advanced prototype, and the folks at Neuroswing informed me of some planned improvements when they sent it to me. Here’s how on-the-ball they are: the few, and very minor, nits I had with the prototype are already being addressed. They are already planning modifications to the delivery piece to improve teeing precision, modification of the stop strip on the tees to be more rigid, and there will be three red height-adjustment dots, for the different height tees, printed directly on the main tube, instead of the sticker which was used on the prototype.

Bottom line: the Neuroswing ball dispenser is lightweight, easy to assemble and set up, easy to break down and stow in its storage bag—and most important of all, it works as advertised. I can’t think of much more that could be asked of a product.

Neuroswing will be launched on Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com) beginning October 14, 2014. The goal of Neuroswing’s Kickstarter initiative is to fund the first production run of its prototype product and to provide for additional research-and-development efforts. Those interested in learning more about Neuroswing’s Kickstarter launch are invited to visit www.kickstarter.com and www.neuroswing.com.