He’s the type of person who always needs to be busy. His classes at Providence College and relationships with his friends are valuable and fulfilling, but he’s eager for more. Keating has long known himself to dive deep into side projects to fill his time and his endless energy.

“I just have a lot of different interests,” Keating told Mid-Major Madness.”I just love to learn about new things and try new things.”

Now in his junior year as a psychology and finance student, the lifelong Friars fan found an old project and dove headfirst into building it.

For years, he’s played sports simulation games on his phone, but a few years ago, he started a Google Doc jotting down notes on how he’d build his own. With just a few middle school and high school coding classes to his name, he had a general idea of the logic it took to build an app, but it was rough around the edges. He understood the math behind it but couldn’t figure out how to put it all together.

After forgetting about the document for a few years, Keating, sitting in class during the early part of his sixth college semester in his native Rhode Island’s capital, decided to dive back into it. Whenever he had time, he would stare at his computer for hours on end, figuring out how to build a user interface that didn’t have too much going on, but was still in-depth enough to have a level of intrigue. The result was Hardwood Empire.

Within two weeks of launch, the game had over 40,000 downloads. Keating never expected it to gain this much traction this early, but everybody is playing it. I personally spent five hours building Charleston into 13-time national champions before I ever even spoke with Keating. Social media personalities like Elite Takes, CBK Report, and Ryan Hammer have praised the game, but Keating hasn’t spent a dime on promotion. Even Division-I head coaches are excited, like Northern Illinois’ Matt Majkrzak, who said that he spent a plane ride playing.

And since it blew up, the work hasn’t stopped. Keating has lost nearly all of his sleep in favor of trying to crank out updates as fast as possible in order to give the community the college basketball experience that it 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.”