ALEXANDRIA – A new basketball development facility is open for business in Alexandria – The Hoops District.

The Hoops District is a membership-based basketball development facility located at the corner of 12th Avenue West and Broadway Street.

On Wednesday, July 19, 2023, The Hoops District hosted a grand opening that ran from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.

“It is pretty surreal,” Coach Andrew Wiener said. “Looking at some of this place’s before and after pictures is ridiculous. It is unbelievable.”

Wiener said the facility’s purpose is to train basketball players, especially younger players from elementary school to college level players, efficiently and effectively.

“The idea is to allow kids to have a safe space to go get a good efficient workout in an hour or less, but also to have a clear space where they can just come hang out,” Wiener said. “We have a lounge upstairs, where they can do their homework, they can hang out with friends here, just be around basketball in kind of a secure space. So the ages for these facilities are generally high schoolers and younger guests. Our overarching goal is to create more access for kids, but we also can have some adult members. We want groups to have access to some of the state-of-the-art basketball technology. We want to find kids who are maybe trying to find consistent access to a hoop, and we want to expose more people to the game. We’re just trying to grow the game the best we can.”

Part of the state-of-the-art equipment includes the Dr. Dish shooting machines with TVs connected to them.

“That can kind of give you a better user experience,” Wiener said. “It gives you a nice big picture of what your shooting percentage is. It’s an interactive experience. We have got a dribbling machine, which is basically it is kind of like guitar hero meets ball-handling training. It is a track that is coming at you on the screen, it’s got different moves, and you need to try to time out your moves with the moves that come out at you on the screen, and it gives you a score. It is kind of a video game application to athletic training.”

Wiener said that later on, they will have camps and other opportunities for young kids to be exposed to the game.

According to Wiener, the members of the facility will have keypad access to the facility via an app, and the facility, which operates from 6 a.m. to midnight, will be secured.

“They will be placed in a locked facility that they will have keypad access to with their app. So they know when they come in, they are secure,” Wiener said. “If they come here for late night workout or after dark, they can feel secure in our facility. We have security cameras and all that good stuff too.”

Basketballs will be provided by the facility, but users of the facility can bring in their own if they would like.

The Hoops District has different payment plans for members.

“A single membership is $2,000 a year, and we experienced some sticker shock with that, but the way we break it down though is if a member uses it twice a week on average, it breaks down to about $19 per use,” Wiener said.

“If you go to the Twin Cities or Fargo, and you want to use a shooting machine for an hour, it costs somewhere between $40 and $80 to use it for an hour. Here you have unlimited access from 6 a.m. to midnight, 365 days a year. If you want to come here at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve and get some shots up, you can do that here. If you want to make monthly payments, it’s about $200 a month, which is a little bit more expensive. We’re pushing people to get committed and use it a bunch over the course of a year. We also have family memberships where with every kid they add, it gets a little cheaper per member.”

Wiener said a side goal of having the facility is to have an open and fun environment for kids to hang out.

“I envision kids of various ages doing homework up in the players’ lounge,” Wiener said. “I envision them getting a workout in and doing homework. We want this to be a safe spot for kids.”

On top of that, Wiener said they plan on using the players’ lounge as a study and hangout space.

The Hoops District rents the building, and Wiener said they became interested in the building in February of 2022.

“We worked Ben Zacher, and he owns the building, and once we found it, we wanted it right away,” Wiener said on July 19. “The transformation was very crazy. It was a parking garage basically for all Ben’s vehicles and kind of recreational stuff. We started renovating in March, and things were still coming in this morning. It’s been pretty grueling work to get things set up the way they are.”

Wiener is one of four coaches working for The Hoops District, along with trainers Tyler Danielson, Brett Smith, and Jake Smith.

Wiener is the director of and a coach for the

West Central United

American Athletic Union (AAU) basketball program based in Alexandria, and both Smiths and Daniels are coaches for the program.

“All of them either coach youth basketball or AAU basketball with me,” Wiener said. “We’re going to be adding trainers kind of all the time as we find more qualified people. But the three that we have are excellent; they have got all sorts of experience. Two of them coach here locally with the Alexandria Youth Basketball Club. Tyler is going to be playing college men’s basketball at Minnesota North College-Hibbing and is also going to be an assistant coach with the women’s team. And he was an assistant last year with the Visitation College women’s team (and played for the men’s team). So he has got a bunch of experience as a young guy.”

Wiener is an Alexandrian who graduated from Jefferson High School in 2004. He then played college basketball at Rainy River Community College in International Falls and finished school at St. Cloud State (2008).

His first coaching job came in 2009, where he coached for the 9th-grade team at Foley High School. Ironically, one of the players he coached then is current Alexandria boys and girls tennis coach Nick Jansen.

After working with the Minnesota Comets AAU program in St. Cloud, he moved to Alexandria in 2011 and started up the West Central United AAU program.

Wiener has always wanted to have a basketball training facility like this in Alexandria, and now he does.

“The big idea 12 years ago was to have a full four or five courts, but with rising costs and COVID hitting, that just was not realistic anymore,” he said. “Then it kind of morphed into a training facility that will provide what we have here, and that became an idea two years ago.”

Wiener described working towards starting this new facility in Alexandria as a family effort.

“We kind of took a leap with my life savings, and my wife was kind enough and gracious enough to dive in with both feet with me,” he said. “It has been countless late nights working and scrubbing floors and walls and working on stuff. It’s been a pretty incredible thing. My parents and in-laws have been here working. We have had some contractors come in and do some things that have been necessary, but it is a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff has been done by my parents, my wife, my in-laws, and myself. I appreciate them beyond words.”

More information and updates from The Hoops District can be found on their

Twitter

page (@TheHoopsDistrct) or

Facebook

page (The Hoops District Basketball facility).