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80 years, five generations, two families, same recipes
April 6, 2026
VILLAGE OF HARRISON – To honor his grandfather, father and two uncles, Ryan Giordana said he and his wife, Rebecca, wanted to build a sports facility in or near Kaukauna that would make his family proud and carry on the name.
Setting his dreams in motion, Giordana said, led to the creation of Legacy Hoops, which recently broke ground in the Village of Harrison, with an expected completion date sometime this fall.
An indoor sports facility, Giordana said Legacy Hoops will feature two full-length basketball courts, six pickleball courts, 12 shooting lanes and birthday party rentals.
“I would describe Legacy Hoops as a basketball facility first and foremost,” he said. “That will be the primary audience and my passion behind this, but obviously, my main clients are the youth who will be in school nine months of the year.”
Giordana said the facility will shift its focus to pickleball during the school year to help offset the absence of Kaukauna-area youth.
“Each full basketball court can hold three pickleball courts, so there will be a total of six courts people can utilize during the school year,” he said. “Basketball will take priority once the kids are out of school.”
Another key component of Legacy Hoops, Giordana said, is its 12 basketball shooting lanes, each equipped with Shoot-A-Way Guns.
“These shooting lanes give shooters greater than the width of a free-throw lane and a three-point arc,” he said. “There are a bunch of different Shoot-A-Way Gun levels you can purchase, from something you put in your driveway all the way up to the highest-priced ones I have in this facility.”
Giordana said Shoot-A-Way Guns offer a range of benefits, including:
- Automatically rebounded basketballs
- Returning passes to the shooter
- Tracking shooting statistics
- Allowing players to take hundreds of shots in a short amount of time
“A net surrounds the hoop and funnels made or missed shots back into the machine, which then passes the ball back out,” he said. “The software supports leaderboards that I’ll display inside the facility. People can rent time memberships monthly or annually for these shooting lanes.”
Lastly, Giordana said Legacy Hoops will offer party rentals, allowing patrons to reserve portions of the facility for private events.
“There is a room I’m calling the ‘team room’ where teams can talk about basketball stuff and go over things,” he said. “That room will also serve as a space for birthday parties, etc., where families can bring in their food and drinks and then go into the gym area.”
Giordana said Keller, Inc. is the general contractor working on the building.
“With between 19,000 and 20,000 square feet of space, I think it will be really beneficial to the community,” he said.
A family ‘Legacy’
When picking a name for the facility, Giordana said it was very important to him to honor his family legacy – hence the name: “Legacy Hoops.”
He said his grandfather, Carl, was well known in the Kaukauna community.
“He worked at Holy Cross Parish and was the athletic director there,” he said. “He always went above and beyond serving the youth of the community and bringing kids into the gym. I grew up spending time with my grandfather in gyms. In 1994, they named the gym at Holy Cross after him.”
Additionally, Giordana said Carl’s three sons – Reed, Ross and Rick (his father) – were prominent athletes in Kaukauna, coached youth sports and gave back to the community in other ways.
“My two uncles and father carried that family legacy on from my grandfather, and now I view this as my calling to carry on the legacy of the Giordana name and athletics in the Kaukauna area,” he said.
Because he maybe wasn’t the prominent athlete his grandfather, uncles and father were, Giordana said he figured he could give more back to the community through a facility like Legacy Hoops.
“I did basketball, football, track and volleyball in high school and then attended [the University of Wisconsin-]Stevens Point for college,” he said. “I could have probably been a benchwarmer on the Stevens Point team, but I decided to play intramurals in college, hang out with my friends and go to school.”
Though he didn’t reach the same athletic level as others in his family, Giordana said his passion and love for basketball remain just as strong.
“I have two children, and as soon as they could hold a basketball and walk, I coached their teams from the YMCA levels into the Kaukauna youth program,” he said. “I’ve been involved in a finance role for my career for many years, but I always wanted to build something like Legacy Hoops.”
Giordana said he has had a vision of opening a multi-use facility for at least five years, taking a conservative approach as he worked through the steps to bring Legacy Hoops to life.
“[Around] December 2024, I knew I was not getting any younger, and my kids were at an age where I thought I’d better do this now if I wanted them to benefit from it and be a part of the process,” he said.
Giordana said that vision finally began to take shape when the project broke ground last month.
“Initially, I thought maybe I could just find a building and have a couple of hoops in there and do some small-scale training,” he said. “A real estate guy worked with me in looking at what buildings might be available, but nothing really matched the needs of what I wanted to do.”
Before he knew it, Giordana said his vision grew.
“Then it became, ‘Oh, I want a full court or maybe two,’” he said. “The ceiling heights also had to be high if we wanted to do volleyball or something. It started as a smaller-scale exploration, but when we crunched the numbers on costs and revenue projections, we decided a larger footprint of a building was the way to go.”
Giordana said it was also important that the location of the facility be near his house.
“Legacy Hoops is only about a mile and a half from my house,” he said. “I really wanted to be rooted in the Kaukauna area as well. I’m really happy all of it is coming to fruition.”
To keep updated on the construction process, Giordana said folks can check out Legacy Hoops on Facebook.
