Unique Perspective: Heater Sports

The Heater brand of products is known for being an affordable “entry level” product. Trend/Heater provides pitching machines, batting tees, hitting nets, soft toss machines, and a number of other products. Heater products have their place in the market and I caution anyone that is going to purchase a Heater product to make sure they consider what type of usage they will have.

If you are a high school level baseball or softball player, purchasing a
Heater product is probably not in your best interest. It will not be powerful enough or strong enough material for this level, depending on what you purchase. Heater products however can be a great fit for a younger player trying to explore their interest level in baseball or softball. Heater products are a bit less expensive and good products to use as a parent or player attempting to find out if baseball or softball is a long-term fit for themselves or their kids. There is an exception to this where a high school level player can find very good use out of a Heater product.

I personally have a high school age son and we purchased a Heater X-Tender 24 foot cage a few years back. This cage is not constructed well enough for us to hit live continuously in it as it would get holes etcetera, however setting it up for soft-toss and tee work it has worked great. The cage is made of 1 ¼ inch poly netting, this compares to a standard cage is 2 inch netting. This works fine for younger kids and for tennis balls, however for high school age kids this will wear out pretty quickly.

We found it easy to use the cage for soft toss and tee work, focusing on hitting mechanics. We sometimes will do short toss with tennis balls also. The Heater X-Tender 24 foot cage is only 24 foot long by 12 foot wide and 12 foot high. This takes up minimal room in the yard. Assembly of this cage is very quick and we will take it down for cold weather months or when it is outside of baseball season. This has been a great item to work on the mechanics of hitting by just stepping in our backyard. We typically go to hitting lessons at a facility and then come home and work on the items discussed at the lessons in the backyard in the X-Tender off of a tee.

With so many products on the market at all different price points and quality of products it is always important to do your research. The goal is to find the equipment that will work for you at the best possible price. Heater products can fill this need at times.