Tech
There will be a limited, undisclosed amount of the Wilson Airless Gen1 basketballs. Each ball will be labeled by its exact number in the production line.
Wilson’s eventual goal is to make the ball more widely accessible as the Gen1 will not be the final iteration of the ball.Wilson Sporting Goods
Wilson is releasing a limited, undisclosed amount of its “airless” 3D-printed basketballs for sale on Feb. 16 for $2,500 apiece.
The ball going to market, titled the Wilson Airless Gen1 basketball, is the next iteration of a prototype the company introduced in 2023, which combined powder, lasers and lattice to produce a basketball that does not require inflation.
Since the prototype was released, the ball’s lattice design has been updated to achieve a more consistent bounce, holes were added to the “channels” (which fill the role of the seams on a traditional ball) to expedite manufacturing times, and brown and white colorways were made available in addition to the prototype’s black. Each ball will also be labeled by its exact number in the production line.
Wilson partnered with General Lattice (computational design), Dye Mansion (color/finishing), EOS (technical oversight) and SNL Creative (manufacturing) on several key aspects of developing and distributing Airless Gen1.
Dr. Nadine Lippa, Innovation Manager at Wilson, oversees the project. She joined Wilson in 2018 with a simple edict from Kevin Krysiak, now the company’s Sr. Director of Global Research & Development, Team Sports: “Reinvent the basketball.”
“Additive manufacturing was something we talked about from day one,” Lippa told SBJ. “But I think what really worked here is we just came to it with an open mind.”
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Wilson tested the Airless Gen1 against its retail and game basketballs in a lab environment, and solicited feedback from players and industry shows, with the goal of ensuring as close a match to the performance of a traditional ball as possible.
“(The Airless Gen1’s) material properties are going to be completely different (from a traditional basketball) because we’re asking one material with holes in it to do what four materials, plus compressed air, does,” Lippa said. “You could say it’s outdoing the legacy materials in that regard.
“And then in terms of performance, it matches the weight, rebound, circumference, size – and an important thing for us is that we get consistent rebound across the surface of the ball. Those are the metrics that we look at and compare it back.”
At the current price point, Krysiak acknowledges the ball is not for the masses. But he noted that Wilson saw enough demand throughout the prototyping process to justify this limited release, and that Gen1 will not be the final iteration of the ball.
“We knew that the manufacturing costs of this – with the material, the technology – it’s expensive, because we’re still very much in the early stages of what’s possible and what’s capable,” Krysiak said. “We had to balance back and forth: What should we do? People want this. It’s kind of like those tech connoisseurs – maybe shoe culture, sneaker culture is a parallel to it.”
Eventually the goal is to make the ball more widely accessible. But that will rely on some level of a paradigm shift in 3D printing.
“A lot of the materials that are out there, especially in the 3D printing space, are counter, property-wise, to the things we’re looking for,” he said. “You see a lot of 3D-printed foams, things that are trying to deaden, rebound, protect – whether it’s in helmets and hockey gear and things like that – where we’re trying to get something that’s very resilient, very grippy, that plays like a basketball.
“Our hope is that, as 3D printing continues to spread and those costs come down and the material suppliers see, ‘Hey, there’s an application for this that makes sense for us,’ to pursue things that are resilient… The more people that realize that there’s a market out there for that, that’s ultimately what’s going to drive the price down.”