How one college kid built Hardwood Empire, the viral college basketball simulation app

And that’s really all he wants.

“I always knew it was going to be important for me to get a community-based game,” Keating said*.* “I really value that in almost everything I do.”

Keating has experience as part of the online college sports community. He runs Commit Circuit, a service where high school and collegiate athletes pay for a custom social media commitment graphic. It’s given him the sharp, designer’s eye that helped him know what he wanted to build for Hardwood Empire, but also gave him an understanding of how to listen to others in terms of feedback and revisions.

That also allowed him to flex his entrepreneurial muscles. He says that he has “a million little things” that he’s tried to build but didn’t work. But he’s always going to create his own busy-ness.

“I’m definitely someone that likes to be busy,” Keating said. “I like to be productive. I want to go out and get these things, and I like to think I learned that from my grandfather. He was a really hard worker, and I just look up to him and his work ethic, and I try to have a similar work ethic. I think good things come from working hard.”

You can’t question Keating’s drive in terms of building the game or building anything. He’s not afraid of failure, but always tries to find a way to learn from it.

While the focus on community was the end-goal, the game itself is his own brainchild. Based on previous games, he knew where to start. That Google Doc from two years prior still had the initial coding and math that he’d need for the simulation.

“I kind of started this project two years ago,” he said. “I thought it would be good to put in some of the formulas for a team’s scoring, home-court advantage and for rankings. It took bits and pieces from other games, but I did that for maybe some weeks, and I didn’t really expand upon it much.”

But he also had a few ideas about how he wanted to build Hardwood Empire differently.

“I’ve played pretty much every (college basketball simulation) on the market,” Keating said. “And I always thought there was too much going on. I thought what was really important to remember was that this was on a phone. Not that it means it needs to lack depth, but it just means you can’t have too much going on on the screen.”

In January 2026, Keating remembered the document as he’d been getting back into the swing of college basketball season and remembered his plan as well.

He had the drive. He had the vision. And if you have those two things, you can really create anything in today’s world. And you can do it cheaply, too.

Thanks to Commit Circuit and his school email, he had subscriptions to AI resources that became a trusted ally in the game’s development.

“What helped me a lot was the use of AI,” Keating said. “I used AI to help me with the UI. And it helped me with some of the more minute things that would’ve taken me a longer time to do.”

He doesn’t like the term vibe-coding, as he believes it implies that he wasn’t working hard, which he absolutely was. Keating was very intentional about using AI to help him build the app. It helped him turn a busy screen with too much going on into a manageable set of screens that created an easy user experience. It helped him turn the ideas from the Google Doc into a playable game.

Keating’s friends at Providence are used to him sitting on his computer, making himself busy with a project. Building Hardwood Empire was no different, as he’d spent his free time quietly working on it until early March, when he sent a few videos to one of his best friends. He’d finally had something that he said he was happy with and wanted to get some other eyes on it to help cross the finish line of putting the game out.

“Would you want to try this out?” Keating asked.

He thought his friend might be interested, as they both loved college basketball, and he was right.

“Oh my god, that looks so fun,” was the response.

“That gave me another push,” Keating said of hearing the support. “I think that was very important in the process.”

The excitement gave Keating the confidence that he needed to start building the game community that would grow to be so critical. Shortly after, on March 11,  he made a post on the Subreddit for Campus Dynasty – another college basketball simulation game – showing off the design, asking if people were interested in the concept and whether anybody would want to beta test.

The post got a ton of positive responses. The seeds were sown. And the back-burner that the project had sat on for two years was so far in the rear view mirror.

“Knowing there was a community that wanted it, it just kind of motivated me to get through all of the stuff I didn’t like UI-wise and any issues I had with simulation logic,” Keating said. “As soon as I started to get more community feedback, I was able to incorporate it into the game.”

He created the Hardwood Empire Subreddit, where he continued to post updates on the progress of building the game over the next two weeks. On March 26, the app became available on iOS.

It was far from perfect, but it was a terrific start. And Keating’s promise to be community-first could really take shape.

Keating sought out feedback and advice on new features to add to the game, putting the game out there on different social platforms and losing sleep in order to quickly turn around updates. Just a month after launch, the game is already on Version 2.9.

On Twitter, the game really started to break contain. In the days following the national championship game, if you were on college basketball Twitter, you saw countless screenshots from Hardwood Empire mixed in between transfer portal news.

By April 11, Hardwood Empire was the No. 1 free sports game on the App Store charts. The game had gotten so big, so fast, that Keating had started to see people that he knew playing the game without them knowing that he’d built it. He wasn’t done building.

He created a Discord server to help streamline feedback from his growing base of users. He immediately got to work on implementing those suggestions into the game.

“I’ve probably slept a combined 10 hours this past week,” Keating said on April 15. “I was trying my best to manage my time, but right now, I’ve given this more priority. I want to strike while the iron is hot.”

But what does striking mean? While he says he won’t close any paths off, Keating isn’t necessarily trying to become a full-time game developer. He’s studying finance to become a wealth manager like his grandfather, as well as psychology. But now, he’s created something that a community is invested in, and he wants to keep that going as long as he can.

He hasn’t thought a ton about the long-term ramifications of the game. What is there to think about in that sphere anyway? Keating is focused on maintaining the buzz as long as he can.

“I think the community is going to be the main decider of if the game stays relevant,” he said. “I’m already listening to them. I have a lot of people asking for certain things. I have a lot of confidence in it. I think people can sense the originality and the community focus is going to separate this app from other apps that try to do the same thing. I think it already has a crazy fanbase who are gonna stick loyal to it.”

Hardwood Empire is a simple game to play. Choose a team, set the rotations, allocate your recruiting resources, and let the simulation engine cook. Sure, it’s repetitive, but that’s what makes it easy to get lost in for hours. You don’t need to build out elaborate spreadsheets to have full control over your team, and you can play dozens of seasons in just a few hours.

And the college basketball world is eating it up.

“This still feels surreal,” he said. “Never in a million worlds would I have thought that this would happen. So many people are reaching out and asking all these questions or wanting to talk to me, and I couldn’t tell you I expected this even a week ago. It all just feels like a blur in that sense.”