Questions about shooter Prototype

[KingRandy]

Hello everybody, my team is crunched for time as I imagine 75% of teams are. Anyways, this is our prototype for our shooter (minus the wooden ramp for the ball). I have two questions regarding the finalization of this design....

http://imgur.com/a/WoB5n

1) Has any team made some type of deployment system? To expand upon that, a system that enables you to expand the shooter outside the robot once the match started. In this motion (<--- --->) I was thinking of some sort of piston and rail system. See my cheesy picture.

2) Holder for ball? Can we bend some sort of material?

Thanks for the replies. -Randy L.