On a recent evening, Sam Brand led me down a shoulder-squeezing spiral staircase into a basement, then asked me to wait for a minute while he rooted around for a light switch.

I stood in a darkened door, waiting to see his dream growing in an old church in midtown Baltimore.

Once the floodlights came on, the space transformed — from a dimly lit basement into a well-lit basement. It was dusty. Construction materials and boxes of T-shirts lined the walls.

Brand, the former championship-winning prep coach at Poly and the vaunted director of Team Melo, asked me to use my imagination — a lot of it — to picture this space as a game changer for Baltimore youth basketball.

On one wall, there will be classrooms and tutoring spaces. Beneath our feet, training turf that one day will house squat racks. In the corner, a renovated kitchen for nutrition. Where there once was a baptismal tub, there will be hydrotherapy and recovery areas.

All he needs? A few million dollars.

I know what you’re thinking. I was thinking it, too. Isn’t that kind of a pipe dream?

Not at all, Brand said. In the wild world of youth sports, where colleges and youth programs seem to be burning through cash, $3 million can sound downright reasonable to the right investor.

“I’ve seen more money invested in identifying the next one good high school player than it would cost to fix this building, which is going to produce a bunch of them,” Brand said. “Right now, I feel very confident in saying there’s been five future professional basketball players who have been in our building today.”

This is the dream behind the Sanctuary Collective, a nonprofit facility with the backing of Basketball Hall of Fame member Carmelo Anthony that aims to bring high-level coaching to the heart of Baltimore today — and tomorrow hopes to bring a whole lot more. The space already houses a court that is set throughout the former nave of the building, and kids from third graders to high school seniors play in the shadow of a massive organ.

It’s called The Sanctuary as a tribute to the building’s past and a nod to the nurturing influence Brand and his team want to have on young people.

But look a little closer and you’ll realize it’s more like a fort — a place being built to keep the area’s young talent in the community and give them the same opportunities pricey basketball academies offer well outside the city.

A talent-extraction trend

When Anthony’s “House of Melo” exhibit opened at the Enoch Pratt Free Library across the street, the children at the Sanctuary Collective were a huge part of the fanfare, ushered inside the yellow chain-link area around the podium as Mayor Brandon Scott, Gov. Wes Moore and Anthony himself dedicated it.

The subtext of honoring one of Baltimore’s greatest hoop legends was that everyone gathered hoped to see more grassroots stories like his in the future — a hope Anthony himself holds dear as much as anyone.

“It just gives you a deeper appreciation of what we’re doing, the work we’re doing, coming back to a city like Baltimore,” he said. “I could be doing anything that I want to do. I could be anywhere in the world, but we’re bringing it back here to the city.”

The biggest thing keeping Baltimore from manufacturing the next homegrown hoops story is outside influence.

The city went through this with Anthony himself, who transferred from Towson Catholic to Virginia powerhouse Oak Hill Academy for his senior year. This past year’s Baltimore success story, Derik Queen, who starred with Maryland as a one-and-done player before getting drafted by the New Orleans Pelicans, played at Montverde Academy in Florida for three years after being plucked from St. Frances.

He famously shouted out his home city after his buzzer-beating basket against Colorado State, but some of his best prep years were never witnessed by Baltimore fans.

From his time at Poly to his time with Team Melo, Brand has seen how the best players in the city are exported to expensive academies on scholarship deals. It used to be that the best instruction elite players could get — as well as the best competition — was at city rec centers. They were the boot camps that forged the area’s top players.

Before playing at Morgan State, Brand played often in East Baltimore’s Oliver Rec Center — a facility that is shuttered. As the director of the Team Melo AAU program, Brand noticed that fewer and fewer of his players lived in the city, which he attributes to the commercialization of youth basketball access.

“The corporate interests in the game and the interest in finding the next star was one of the things that created taking the next star out of their community as soon as possible,” he said. “If corporate interests take over an entity, its best access is no longer gonna be in the ’hood.

“This is not rocket science to understand why.”

A holistic approach

Although this conversation is framed around basketball, it’s about a lot more.

On the evening Brand and I met, he ran a few minutes late. Across the street at the library, one of his kids was dawdling on his homework and needed extra attention.

Brand has been out of public schools for a few years, but some things don’t change. Homework before basketball.

“My beginning in doing this came from being a public schoolteacher and coach,” he said. “I don’t hide that at all.”

The Sanctuary has after-school partnerships with the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, The Mount Royal School and Roland Park Elementary/Middle School (BLSYW also has in-school programming). Between these programs and individual registrations, The Sanctuary serves 200 to 270 kids per week — and not all of them play basketball.

One day, The Sanctuary’s staff hopes, the after-school tutoring, along with options such as yoga and other wellness programming, will be in what is now the dusty basement. The Sanctuary touts a partnership with mental and behavioral health institute Leading By Example, which also will help with nutrition once the kitchen is renovated. Whiting-Turner is the contracting partner in the renovation project, and the renderings that The Sanctuary shared with The Banner (which does not have permission to publish them) show a compelling, futuristic-looking space.

The operation is in part driven by the nostalgia for the old city rec centers, but it is also trying to one-up them with a holistic approach. “This model of community center is the future,” Brand said.

The Sanctuary also gives scholarships to kids and families who cannot afford to pay, which adds to the challenge of finding long-term financing. Chief Operations Officer Tiffany Taylor-Watson, who joined the executive team in September, is recruiting health care partners to help the nonprofit finish renovating the basement to make it the holistic campus of their dreams.

It is ambitious, the team admits. But, in the multibillion-dollar world of youth basketball, where a Division I basketball player can earn over $1 million in name, image and likeness and revenue-sharing income per season, a few million isn’t a wild investment for a facility that can help keep some of Baltimore’s best talent in the city.

Taylor-Watson is a Morgan State grad who points to development — the Pendry, Harbor East, the Peninsula — as evidence that the city doesn’t shy away from big projects that outsiders might doubt.

“People will invest in a thing where they see opportunity,” Taylor-Watson said. “We’re talking about coming up with a couple of million dollars — which is what we need, a couple of million dollars. That’s thrown around real easily in the world of sport, in the corporate world and in this city.”

Even though their campus needs renovation, they’re in talks to expand their operation and franchise the model elsewhere.

The Sanctuary aims to do a lot of good for a lot of kids in Baltimore, but Brand understands he will have to produce big-time players in his modified church for high-level investors to write checks.

At Poly he produced 19 DI scholarship players over his last four seasons, and he has experience coaching with Nike and USA Basketball. The nonprofit may be the new venture, but he has been minting elite hoopers for a long time.

“If it was just about what’s right, you should invest in a place like this with no pros,” Brand said. “But I ain’t stupid. I’m not. I understand people don’t believe in investing in what’s right.”

Then he pointed at the floor of the basement, catching a glint in his eye.

“But guess what,” he added. “This is where the pros coming out of. And I have a history to prove it.”

Boots on the ground

Stacking up at 4-foot-11, 10-year-old Blair Brown took a breather to tell me about his burgeoning basketball career. Donning glasses and an impassive expression, he told me it has been “awesome” to come to the sanctuary after he leaves school in Lutherville. “I have five friends here,” he says, showing the count on the fingers of his left hand.

He likes the side hoops where he can work on his shooting by himself, but his favorite drills are ball-handling — a comment that makes the eavesdropping Brand pump his fist. When I told him he reminds me of how Anthony Davis looked as a kid, Brown said he didn’t know who Davis was — “but I met Carmelo Anthony the other day.”

The goal of The Sanctuary is, of course, to keep kids occupied after school and develop them as basketball players. But, above all, it wants to make kids feel cared for.

At his exhibit opening, Anthony pointed out that he lived in the Murphy Homes just about five minutes from the library and, without support, he might never have gone on to his Hall of Fame career. He hopes to create the same kind of pathways for Baltimore kids today.

“I see these kids a lot,” Anthony said. “I really have a different type of relationship and a different type of bond with these kids, because I’m here. I’m boots on the ground. I’m at practice with these kids. I’m at the games. I’m traveling. So they respect that. I think the No. 1 thing for these kids is consistency. Be consistent with ’em, you’ll get results.”

The backers of The Sanctuary aim to strengthen community ties, connecting high-level players closer to the city that they’re from, but it also is something they hope will make American basketball stronger in general. The son of a community activist, Brand believes the key to talent development lies in giving everyone, regardless of economic background, the same playing field.

He noted that the U.S. spends an inordinate amount of money on youth soccer organizations yet has never ascended to a men’s world soccer powerhouse. In his view, that’s because soccer is often accessible only to the families who can afford expensive travel teams and clubs — and he fears basketball is going in the same direction. The last five NBA MVPs were not American-born, which feels like a harbinger to Brand.

“If you don’t have true accessibility in basketball for development in our working-class communities, you are not going to be the best basketball country in the world anymore,” he said.

It is too late to separate the game from the business that has grown exponentially around it, a business that Brand and his staff view as harmful to the communities where young basketball stars come from. But, through his experience and connections, Brand hopes to redirect the corporate forces into investing into the city rather than simply extracting.

All they need is a little money. When they find the right investor, Brand said, watch what happens.

“When we make this playing field even,” he said, “we’re gonna show our separation — like we always do.”