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Basketball has taken Kenny Hatch from Daly City to Laredo, Texas, to small towns in Spain and Italy. His playing days are done, but he’ll never be done with basketball, the sport that has brought him back to San Francisco, to a neighborhood he’d only known from skateboarding growing up. 

Hatch, a 31-year-old St. Ignatius alumnus, spent five seasons playing professional basketball overseas before becoming a skills development coach. His latest venture, Kenny Hatch Basketball, a multimillion-dollar facility at 600 Indiana St. in the Dogpatch, opened Saturday. It’s just four blocks from Chase Center.

“Things like this aren’t easy,” Hatch told The Standard. “And they don’t happen often. So when I see it and realize, like, oh, it’s my gym, and I’m a part of this bigger thing, it’s extremely gratifying.” 

Purchasing a warehouse — purchasing any type of real estate in the Bay Area — isn’t cheap. Neither is refurbishing it into a state-of-the-art training facility with three baskets and an NBA-grade court surface. All told, the price was around $4 million. 

Hourlong training sessions run from $50 to $190 — depending on if they’re in private or group — coached by Hatch and his staff of former college and pro players. That’s a lot of Mikan drills.

The secret to affording his dream? He’s not really paying for it. The father of one of his clients is.

“I looked at him as someone who’s giving back to the community and trying to bring a place to kids and aspiring high school and college players a place to develop,” said Jeff Chang, Hatch’s business partner and the father of Tate, a sixth-grade hooper who’s been working with Hatch for a few years.

“I looked at it as an opportunity both for me to be able to build a gym, but then to also have a partner who specialized in the training aspect. It came together and I felt, honestly, it’s a way to pay it forward.”

Chang, copresident of San Francisco-based investment bank Qatalyst, is a longtime Warriors season-ticket holder and basketball super fan. He’s never done a real estate deal like this, but Kenny Hatch Basketball is a passion project. 

“He’s trying to build a business and provide for his family,” Chang said of Hatch. “But at the same time give back a lot of what he’s learned over a long period of time through high school, college and the pro ranks in Europe, back to the community here in San Francisco.”

When Hatch started at St. Ignatius as a freshman, he was the shortest kid in his class, at 4-foot-11. The varsity head coach, Tim Reardon, said Hatch’s stature made him come off like “a little mascot.”

He was cut four times in tryouts. 

Getting left off the S.I. rosters forced Hatch to teach himself how to play. He watched Youtube videos like Steve Nash’s 20-minute workout, (opens in new tab) going through drills over and over again (he stuck with Nash’s plan all the way through his final professional season). 

Hatch and his younger sister Maddy — who also went on to play professionally overseas — would wake up at 4 or 5 a.m. to get in workouts before school.

“That’s kind of where I fell in love with the training part,” Hatch said. “Because I was working out two to three times a day, trying to make the team. … It became this, like, beautiful thing for me.”

Finally, Hatch got a shot at playing high school ball. Because of injuries to the varsity team during summer league, Reardon texted Hatch to ask if he still wanted to play.

Joining the team was a no-brainer. By then, Hatch had grown about a foot. He guarded his teammate, Division I-bound guard Trevor Dunbar, like a “bulldog,” Reardon said. 

“He really believed that he was good enough to compete,” Reardon said, “even though people had kind of given up on him.” 

Hatch parlayed the chance into the starting point guard spot at Cañada College in Redwood City, and then transferred to Division II Texas A&M International before playing in Europe.

Not bad for a mascot. His new gym is a physical manifestation of his underdog story. 

“The hopeful impact is that the next Kenny or the next Maddy who maybe gets cut or doesn’t want to get cut shows up, and they’re like, ‘Cool, you guys have been through it, you guys are going to help me make the team or you’re going to help me succeed,’” Hatch said.

Juan Toscano-Anderson met Hatch around 2016 at a pickup run at Jamtown in Oakland and considers the trainer one of his closest friends. 

A former NBA champion with the Warriors who currently plays in Italy, Toscano-Anderson has worked with Hatch on everything from fundamentals to the minute details of the game. “He puts me through drills that are challenging for me,” the player said.

“I think nowadays with social media and AAU being a money grab and people realizing how much people are willing to pay for training, there’s just so much smoke and mirrors in this game now,” Toscano-Anderson continued. “When I train with [Kenny], it’s a breath of fresh air because there’s still purity in the teaching, still purity in the approach to what really matters. What the bread and butter of the game is, those are fundamentals. He’s not doing all the bullshit.” 

Hatch made an impression on Chang, too. The exec first found Hatch on social media and sensed that he could help his son Tate learn how to make the right plays, to improve his ball handling and finishing, rather than the flashy stuff — 12-dribble combinations and step-back 3s. He was so impressed by what Hatch was teaching, he soon considered going from client to business partner. 

As it happened, Chang was passively looking at warehouses to buy with the intent of converting one to a basketball gym for his son. Around the same time for Hatch, business was growing so fast that he wanted to expand to a bigger gym. The location they each coincidentally circled was 600 Indiana St. 

Chang purchased the 5,000-square-foot warehouse for $2.12 million in November 2024. A year and roughly $2 million in renovations and other expenses later, Chang and Hatch held the grand opening. 

Chang said it’s not realistic to expect the business to recoup the $4 million initial investment over the next 10 years or so. But owning a building in the Dogpatch, where Chang anticipates property values to rise, is incentive enough. 

“To be perfectly frank, I’m less focused on the return on investment; I’m more focused on can it serve a greater purpose for the community and for Kenny in terms of growing his business,” Chang said. “Selfishly, I obviously think it’s a great place for my child to keep learning and have access to Kenny and have access to a better facility than what Kenny has today. That’s kind of how I think about it.”

No matter Chang’s intentions, it’s a huge bet on Hatch. Those who know him say he’s worth it. 

Kenny Hatch Basketball is of course driven by Kenny Hatch. But the rest of it is a family business. 

Hatch’s sister Maddy — who grew up shooting in the Daly City mist because she and her brother couldn’t secure gym time — is a player development coach and director of basketball operations.

Hatch’s wife, Alexis, is CEO — a dynamic that keeps dinner-table conversations interesting. 

“We live, breathe, eat Kenny Hatch Basketball,” Alexis said. “That’s all we talk about.” 

The two got married in 2022 and started pursuing the training business after Kenny retired from pro ball. 

They’re self-taught entrepreneurs, with Alexis holding a full-time gig at tech company Sureify. And now they have a gym to reel in customers. 

For Chang, being located at the border of Mission Bay and Dogpatch neighborhoods is another a bet on the future. This is a real estate investment, after all. The UCSF hospital, new housing complex developments, and businesses blossoming out from the Chase Center give Chang a shot at long-term return on his investment — even if that’s not his main priority. 

As part of Hatch’s arrangement, he’s set to pay Chang roughly $10,000 monthly in rent — a figure that’s subject to change based on how the business is doing.

Hatch had visualized his own gym for years, and Alexis said he’s even thought about expanding Kenny Hatch Basketball to other cities. But first, they’ll have to make it work at 600 Indiana St. with Chang. 

“I remember him having this dream of opening up his own gym,” Maddy said. “I remember him talking about it with [Alexis] in the car back from visiting our grandparents. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I don’t know, that’s a pretty insane dream. But if anybody can make it happen, I know it’d be him.’”