I bought this for two reasons, one to encourage my kids to hit the ball for optimum distance and two to keep balls from flying into my neighbor's yard when they got under it a bit. It works well for both aside from the fact that after you hit a half a bucket of balls into the top portion of the net it starts to sag in the center, lessening the desired effect. A way to create a little more tension to keep the net up would have given it 5 stars. Overall a great net though.