Aledo backyard barn batting cage: 70' full-length retractable Cimarron net, Performance Pro turf, clay batter's box

The project

A barn in Aledo, full length, sitting empty. The homeowners have two athletes in the house: a daughter playing softball at a high level and a younger brother who’s a serious baseball player in his own right. Both needed somewhere to get reps on their own schedule, and both needed a space that could host full team practices when the group showed up. The barn was the obvious answer, if it could be converted without giving up the ability to use it as a barn.

The build: a full 70’ x 15’ x 12’ indoor batting cage running the entire length of the structure. Cimarron Sports netting on a retractable cable trolley system, Performance Pro turf over a 5mm pad, and a clay batter’s box at the working end. Cables, net, and turf all went in on the same day, timed to be ready before fall baseball season started.

Why retractable, not fixed

Most barn cage conversions we build are fixed: net up, turf down, done. This one had a hard requirement from the start. The family wanted the option to pull the whole setup back when the cage wasn’t in use, so the barn could still function as a barn the rest of the time.

The solution is the same cable-trolley approach we’ve used on other rafter-hung barn cages, scaled to a full 70-foot run: stainless cable strung the length of the building, red-hooked trolleys riding on it, and the netting clipped in at intervals down the cable. Pull the net back along the trolley line and the cage collapses out of the way. Deploy it and you have a full-length enclosed hitting tunnel with a target and backstop at the far end.

That flexibility is the whole point of a barn cage over a standalone outdoor structure. The building was never going to be single-purpose, and the net shouldn’t force it to be.

Performance Pro turf, 5mm pad, clay batter’s box

The floor is Performance Pro turf over a 5mm foam pad, run the full 70’ length at 15’ wide. That’s roughly 1,050 square feet of dense, short-pile turf built to take repeated cleats-and-swing traffic without matting down.

At the working end, a clay-look batter’s box breaks up the green field the same way it would on an actual diamond: painted lines, a home plate marker, and a mat color that reads as dirt instead of turf. A hitter stepping in gets the same visual cue they’d get in a real box, not just an open stretch of green.

Installed in a day, ahead of fall ball

The entire scope — cable rigging, net hanging, and turf install across the full 70’ run — went in over a single day. That’s the advantage of converting an existing barn shell instead of building a freestanding structure from the ground up: the building, the concrete floor, and the roof structure to hang from were already there. We were installing a system into a finished shell, not building the shell itself.

The timing mattered. The goal was to have the cage ready before fall baseball season, so both athletes could start using it the moment practices ramped back up.

Built for two athletes and a team

A single hitter can pull the net back and take reps solo whenever they want, day or night, without a drive to a public facility. When the full travel team shows up for practice, the same 70’ run handles it: enough length for a real pitching and hitting distance, enough width for the softball side of the family too.

That dual use, solo reps for two kids in different sports plus team-sized practices, is what pushed the project past a standard fixed cage and into a retractable system. The family didn’t want to choose between “always available” and “gets out of the way.” The trolley system gives them both.

What a project like this runs

Pricing on a full-length barn cage conversion in 2026 Bearcat rates depends on a few variables:

• Cimarron netting + cable trolley rigging: scales with cage length and the complexity of the retract mechanism
• Performance Pro turf + pad install: priced by square footage — this run was roughly 1,050 SF
• Clay batter’s box inlay: a fixed add per box, regardless of cage length

A retractable trolley system costs more than a fixed net hung the same way, since the trolley hardware and cable tensioning take more labor to get right. It’s worth it for anyone who needs the barn back for non-baseball use.

Get a quote for your barn or building and we’ll walk the space and measure the rafters.

About Bearcat Turf & Outdoors

Bearcat Turf & Outdoors is a family-owned, Aledo-based outdoor contractor serving the full DFW metroplex. We install batting cages, artificial turf, and outdoor training surfaces on residential and commercial properties across Parker, Tarrant, Denton, Dallas, and Collin counties. HUB Certified by the State of Texas, BBB Accredited, fully insured.

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Before

What we started with.

A finished barn shell: epoxy floor down, rafters exposed, nothing else installed. No cage, no turf, no netting yet.

During

In the build.

Cable rigging off a scissor lift, then turf seamed down the full 70' run. Cables, net, and turf all went in over a single day.

After

The finished space.

Completed-project photography — on-the-ground, in context.