Tennis players looking to improve their game have a challenge. It's not always possible to find someone you can play or practice with when you have the time to go to the court.
Traditionally, this problem has been solved with the tennis ball machine. These tend to be pretty big machines that hold lots of tennis balls that are gravity fed one at a time into a tube. When the ball gets to a certain point in the tube, it encounters a set of fast-spinning rollers that accelerate and fire it out over the net where the practicing player can then return it. Fancy machines can alter the direction and the timing between ball launches.
Amazon features a number of portable tennis ball machines, the price of most of which starts around $1,000 and gets higher from there for all but the smallest and least capable machines. Given their bulky size and their cost, many players who use tennis ball machines will rent them.
But what if it you could shrink the size of a tennis ball machine enough that it could fit into a backpack? Or more ingeniously, is a backpack. One with a clever enough design that can hold as many as 100 tennis balls and your rackets? That could become an affordable option for a casual tennis player or a very useful kit for an enthusiastic player.
Hong Kong-based Nisplay Sports has done just that with their Y1 model, for which they've launched a Kickstarter campaign. The following video features tennis coach Henry So unboxing the Nisplay Y1 and demonstrating it. We've queued the video to start at the demonstration part:
As of 6 February 2026, the campaign has less than 30 days left to go, but has already well surpassed its goal. The campaign's Super Early Bird special is still available for HK $4,282, which is about US $549.