In-depth look: Andy Enfield's basketball odyssey and finding a home at USC

It all happened in the span of a dizzying few days nine years ago.

Andy Enfield had become a national name in college basketball overnight, as his Florida Gulf Coast team became the first No. 15 seed to ever advance to the Sweet 16. After commanding the spotlight through the ensuing media blitz that week, the Eagles then lost on a Friday to Florida, ending their magical run in Arlington, Texas, and formally setting this all in motion.

Enfield and the team flew back to Fort Myers, Fla., and by Sunday evening he was on a plane back to Dallas, where he'd meet with then-USC athletic director Pat Haden and COO/CFO Steve Lopes about the Trojans job in a hotel conference room that Monday morning.

He signed the contract later that night.

"I'd never been out here, I'd never been on campus. So I was taking their word for how special a place it is, and they were right," Enfield says, reflecting back.

Nine years later -- an eternity in a profession not exactly conducive to job stability -- Enfield had no real interest in considering another career move.

Rumors swirled over the last month or so, linking Enfield to the vacant job at Maryland, where he'd attended grad school, much closer to where he grew up in Shippensburg, Pa. Other jobs would be coming open soon as well, and after guiding the Trojans to their first Elite Eight appearance in 20 years last season, his national visibility had spiked again.

On the eve of the Trojans' regular-season finale vs. UCLA two weeks ago, Enfield sat in a room inside Galen Center for more than an hour recounting all the twists and turns from that mutually-impactful job interview nine years ago to this overachieving USC team that tied a program record with 26 wins.

Asked directly if he had received any interest from other schools, either after the Trojans' memorable run last March or in recent weeks, Enfield deftly deflects the question with the stock answer he had used previously whenever the matter came up.

Told that he had delivered neither a yes nor a no to the question, Enfield laughed and said, "I'll be able to tell you more after the season."

It didn't take that long. Three days later USC announced it had signed Enfield to a contract extension through the 2027-28 season.

Reconvening again in his office Monday afternoon, fresh off practice and a day before taking his team to Greenville, S.C., for another NCAA tournament appearance, Enfield still doesn't want to share whether any outside interest was directly conveyed to him or his agent, Bret Just -- but his response says plenty.

"If there is interest from other universities that means that your current program has been successful. I think that's the nature of our business. ... Fortunately, we've been successful here at USC," he says.

What Enfield and those around him do make perfectly clear is that he never wanted to have to consider coaching anywhere but USC. The job he'd accepted nine years ago without knowing all that much about the place had become home for he and his family.

"I knew Andy didn't want to leave here. I feel confident saying that," associate head coach Chris Capko says. "I think he's always come out publicly and said 'My preference is always to stay here.' But it is nice when people mention your name and I think that's just part of the business. ... Andy always kept me abreast of everything that was going on. I knew that he didn't want to leave."

For myriad reasons. One being the feeling he and his family had established true roots by this point, that his three kids had now grown up in Manhattan Beach. Another being what he describes as his extended family -- from his assistant coaches to others working in the program -- and knowing that his stability was their stability.

And also because he and his staff truly believe the best is still yet to come for USC basketball -- that what they've built over nine years may only be the foundation of what they think this program can become.

"It still feels like, man, I can't believe we've been here this long," Capko says. "... To see where the program's at vs. where we were at, we've been through so many games together now we always bring up these old games. I remember when we played at Oregon this year, and he was like, 'Remember when we used to come here and we knew we didn't have a chance and you didn't feel good about the game?' And here we were now, we were 24-4 at that point. So yeah, we've been through a lot of games.

“To be here for the amount of time we've been here still feels like a blessing because it is a blessing. I almost have to pinch myself every now and then, just remind ourself that we've been here that long because it's gone by so fast."

Back in his office Monday, talking about both the flurry of coaching changes that happened around the sport over the last week and the contract extension that removes any doubt about his own immediate future, Enfield praises the USC administration multiple times, from athletic director Mike Bohn and associate ADs Brandon Sosna and Paul Perrier to university president Carol Folt, for the commitment to marketing the program and trying to build the crowds inside Galen Center, and of course, for the formal commitment of that new deal that provided what he wanted most -- security for he and his staff.

"Our intention was to stay here and keep elevating the program. I think the trajectory is going the right way," Enfield reiterates. "... Our goal initially was to try to build the program and sustain the success. Now that we can say we've done that as a coaching staff and as a program, the next step for me as a head coach is to try to determine that -- how long do I want to coach? If you look into the future, my family loves USC and Los Angeles, where we live, our staff. When you look at that as a head coach, it's more than just you personally as well as your immediate family. ...

"When you have opportunities to stay or leave, it's more than just a decision on what you want to do as an individual. I think when you take all of that into consideration our staff has always said we love it here and we believe in USC, we believe in the program and our players and the university, so we think this is a job we can compete for a national championship."

Enfield has had one of the more interesting basketball odysseys among the coaches leading teams into the NCAA tournament this month.

He didn't quite know what he wanted to do after graduating from Johns Hopkins in 1991. He went to work in Washington, D.C., at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), before returning to school at Maryland to pursue his MBA.

"The year working in the business world in Washington, D.C., and going back to business school, I wasn't sure if I was destined to work on Wall Street or the financial sector or in sports," he recalls. "I just followed my passion to start my basketball business and had the finance world as a backup."

Enfield started a multi-pronged basketball venture he called "All Net Basketball" that would in a roundabout way start him on his path to the career he has now.

He had finished at Division III Johns Hopkins as the program's all-time leading scorer with 2,025 points, and more notably, he set the NCAA all-divisions career free throw percentage record at 92.5 percent (making 431 of 466 attempts) -- later broken by Missouri State's Blake Ahearn (94.6 percent) in 2007.

(Anybody who was watched a USC basketball game on television is well aware of this bit of trivia.)

Using his shooting prowess as his credentials -- Enfield was also a 47-percent career 3-point shooter in college -- he launched a series of youth basketball camps and clinics around the Maryland-Virginia area and later beyond. But what he really wanted to do was ply his unique skill set as a specialist in the NBA who could work on players' shooting techniques both in season and in the offseason.

Enfield saw the opportunity to carve out a niche at a time when NBA teams didn't employ specialized player development coaches, but his Division III basketball resume was an easier sell on camp brochures than it was to professional teams -- at least initially.

"I learned a lot of how to deal with rejection, because I was rejected about 99 percent of the time, especially from NBA coaches or agents or general managers," he recalls. "It was very hard to just get in front of people because I wasn't an NBA player or an ex-NBA coach. I was somebody trying to start out and create a niche within the coaching industry at the NBA level."

Enfield eventually found his first NBA player client -- he doesn't want to mention names -- and ultimately Mike Dunleavy, then the head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, invited him to work with the team during the NBA's summer league before formally hiring him.

He was with the Bucks from 1994-96 until the staff changed over and later worked with the Boston Celtics from 1998-2000, as an assistant coach to Rick Pitino before Pitino was eventually fired.

In between, branded as the "Shot Doctor," he ramped up his side work, consulting with a couple dozen NBA players individually, maintaining his youth camps and all the while putting out an instructional video with NBA star Glen Rice.

It was all part of the plan he crafted initially when deciding to pursue a career in basketball, but he soon realized he no longer wanted the NBA coaching life.

Enfield had moved to New York City after his time with the Celtics and was part of a healthcare technology startup company called TractManager. He was a vice president, but he doesn't offer many details when asked about the rather sudden shift in career tracks, other than saying he was brought into it by a friend.

"I thought it was a great opportunity and it was something a little different. I knew I could get back into coaching full-time," he says.

He spent about five years in that job, but basketball was still playing a pivotal role in his life as well.

Aside from continuing to work with NBA players on weekends or time away from the company, and continuing to run some of his camps in the summers, Enfield met his wife Amanda through a mutual friend on a roadtrip to an NCAA tournament.

A professional model working in New York City, she had grown up in Oklahoma as a big Oklahoma State basketball fan because of her dad's interest in the program, which led to how she and Enfield met.

As Amanda Enfield tells the story ...

"I found out [Oklahoma State was] playing in Boston for the NCAA tournament, and I asked a friend of mine -- we modeled a lot together and she was a huge basketball fan -- so I asked her to go up for the weekend. We were going to fly up and she told me before we booked our flights that she had a friend from her gym that was going and offered to drive us, and I was like, 'OK, cool.' It just worked out," she says. "We got along, I didn't think he was too bad, we started dating and now we're like what, 19 years in."

As she shares the story over a phone call, Enfield chimes in on the line, "Our first date was an NIT game between St. John's and Virginia at St. John's, their Alumni Hall on campus."

They would get married and Enfield knew if he did return to a full-time basketball career, it wouldn't be back in the NBA, with the travel schedule and volatile nature of any such coaching job. If it were to happen it would have to be in college basketball.

Enfield was later speaking at the national coaches convention at the Final Four, giving a presentation on player development and shooting, when he reconnected with Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton.

Enfield was already on his radar. As Hamilton recalls, when he was coaching Miami, Enfield would use his gym while working with a major NBA star at the time, and later the agent for a Hurricanes draft prospect hired Enfield to work with his client.

"I needed guys who I felt comfortable with that were good skill developers, and he impressed me and I've always stayed in touch with him and thought that was a unique skill," Hamilton recalls over the phone. "At the time, I felt that's what I needed on my team. I engaged him, we talked about it, I needed somebody like him and he needed an opportunity to be involved so it worked for both of us."

Neither Enfield nor Hamilton remember the specifics of when and how the job was offered, but Hamilton recalls it coming together quickly.

"There was no hesitation at all that I remember," Hamilton says. "I loved his personality, I loved his demeanor, he always seemed to be in control and I thought that he would be good for our program."

He didn't care that Enfield hadn't been on a formal coaching staff for five years or so. He saw the value in that unique skill set, as he put it, and really it was the culmination of everything Enfield had tried to market himself as from the start.

Except unlike how aggressively he had to work to get that first NBA team to buy into what he could offer, the Florida State opportunity came to him.

"Leonard talked to me and asked me if I would think about it, and at the time I was not reaching out to colleges," he recalls. "When he asked me to consider it that's when I really thought about what it meant to be a college basketball coach and I realized that I still had a great passion for the game of basketball and coaching."

Enfield had a family now, though. Amanda had just given birth to their first daughter while on a break from her modeling agency, Wilhelmina. Moving to Tallahassee, Fla., would require a more serious split from a successful career that had taken her around the world.

"Obviously, if she didn't want to do it I would have stayed in New York," Enfield says.

"When I was pregnant with our first child, we talked about, there was an opportunity for him to get into coaching and we just really liked the idea of raising our kids in a college basketball lifestyle. It just sounded like a great idea," Amanda says of her reaction at the time. "The opportunity that happened ended up being in Tallahassee, and it wasn't very realistic for me to continue modeling. ... Actually, I remember the day I was going to tell my agency I was going to move and not stay and come back to work, they were calling me to see if I was ready.

"I don't regret it at all. It's been a fun ride and we've had a lot of awesome moments, so it's been a very good decision that we've been really happy with."

Indeed, it's hard to argue with the results of that pivotal family decision.

Hamilton perceived that Enfield had aspirations of being a head coach in the college ranks one day and pitched him on the opportunity to contribute to a program on the rise in the well-respected ACC. Again, he recalls it was an easy sell and led to Enfield spending five years on staff with the Seminoles from 2006-11.

"I also was impressed with the fact I thought he was a really good evaluator. That's a skill that's unique because it's really difficult to attain. He could go watch guys and evaluate what they were going to become," Hamilton recalls. "... He was very, very helpful to me building this program."

But who could have known then what Enfield was about to become in college basketball?

After those five seasons, Enfield felt he was ready to lead his own program. He had interviewed for one other job that he didn't get before accepting the position at Florida Gulf Coast, which had just become a full-fledged Division I member that summer of 2011.

Less than a week after Enfield's introductory press conference there, Amanda gave birth to their third child.

"I spent a lot of time in the hospital, in the delivery room and then in the hospital rooms after the delivery making recruiting calls," he recalls, laughing. "In one instance I was on the phone and she said, 'Excuse me, I'm trying to have a baby here and I can't hear the nurse, can you please put your phone down.' But I think we ended up signing that player a week or two later so it's worth it."

"It definitely was memorable. That's a nice way to put it," Amanda jokes when asked about that story.

Memorable would also sum up everything that followed at FGCU. In Enfield's second season there, the team went 26-11 while going on that history-making surge in the NCAA tournament, defeating No. 2-seed Georgetown, 78-68, and No. 7 San Diego State, 81-71 to reach the Sweet 16.

That team dubbed "Dunk City" for its fast-paced, exciting brand of basketball, was the story of the sport, putting Enfield square in the spotlight, and Amanda in the scope of the TV cameras during the games as their family story was told to national TV audiences.

"It was so exciting. I think I used the word surreal way too much at the time, but that's what it was," Amanda recalls. "It was really crazy because I grew up loving March Madness because of the Cinderella stories and we got to be one."

Enfield's story was becoming something compelling as well -- from "Shot Doctor" to vice president of a medical technology startup to first-time college assistant coach to very quickly a hot commodity on the coaching market.

Enfield remembers the experience as being "overwhelming" -- in a good way -- and while he says he didn't have time to think about the career implications as that tournament run was playing out, he knew there would be potential decisions to make when it finished.

"After we won the first game, Bret Just -- I think I was his second client when I was at Florida Gulf Coast and he was just starting out in the agent business. It was pretty cool for him too to go through this. He was able to take all the phone calls and interest because I wasn't going to speak to anybody until the season was over, but people started reaching out to just show their interest, 'After the season, could we talk and see where it goes?'" Enfield recalls. "There were quite a few college head coaching jobs open at the time, so he was taking care of that part. Once we lost our game in the Sweet 16, that's when we had to make decisions about meeting with people. ...

"USC just happened to be the first one."

Reflecting back on it a couple weeks ago, Enfield says there were five or six schools who had expressed interest.

Haden and Lopes set up Enfield's USC interview in Dallas so that the two sides could meet halfway. Enfield says he didn't go into that interview knowing for sure that the Trojans job was right for him -- he needed to hear more having never seen the school.

But he knew of the brand -- even if it was mostly driven by football -- and the talent-rich recruiting base in Southern California, along with the academic profile of the university and the opportunity to trade one beach town for another. By the end of that meeting, which lasted four or five hours, Enfield knew he wanted the job.

"I wanted them to hear it from me that I'd like to be the next coach of the Trojans, but there are also other schools interested and I just wanted to be honest with them about it. If you're interested in me let's try to do something; if not I'll meet with these other schools," he recalls.

Enfield wouldn't meet with any other schools. Haden and Lopes flew back to Los Angeles, Enfield flew back to Fort Myers, the contract came later that night and he signed it before going to bed.

Now it was time to really find out what he had just signed up for.

The USC program was coming off back-to-back losing seasons under coach Kevin O'Neill and interim coach Bob Cantu, Two key seniors from that team and NBA-bound Dewayne Dedmon had moved on, leaving the roster light on talent and too late in the recruiting cycle for Enfield and a new staff to find much immediate help.

The truth was while Enfield had taken a much bigger -- and much more well-compensated -- job he had probably taken on a much less talented team than the one he left at Florida Gulf Coast.

And the roster was only part of the challenge.

"I don't know what he expected, he had more insight into it than what I did, but when we got here perception wasn't high. What I think the city and people involved in basketball in the city thought of USC basketball was not high," says Capko, who initially came aboard as Enfield's director of operations. "I was not as plugged in at the time because I was coming from Georgia and Florida, but just being around, you could tell. When we got here, Cal had guys from L.A., they were winning. Utah had guys from L.A., they were winning. Colorado had guys from L.A., they were doing well. UCLA obviously had guys from L.A. The whole league basically had Southern California kids except for us.

"We did have some, but we didn't have some of the better players. For whatever reason, I think the staff before us really didn't recruit the area like that, so just the perception from AAU programs, high school programs, things like that just wasn't that high. Then obviously we had the shadow of UCLA over there, and then you're losing on top of that -- I think we won 11 games our first year, finished dead last in the Pac-12. So you take all that and it compounds and it's just like, man, what are we going to do?"

In addition to hiring Capko, who is now the Trojans' associate head coach, after they got to know each other during his stints at Stetson and Georgia Southern, Enfield brought Kevin Norris with him from Florida Gulf Coast and prioritized hiring two ambitious young assistants from Los Angeles who had connections in the city, in Jason Hart and Tony Bland.

Enfield told the staff they were going to build the foundation through high school recruits who would eventually elevate the program as they developed, rather than try to find quick fixes through the grad transfer market. (The transfer portal wasn't a thing at that time and undergraduate transfers had to sit out a season before being eligible with their new teams).

"We had a short-term and long-term plan, and as hard as it was to stick with that plan, we knew that's the only chance we had," Enfield says. "We haven't had a junior college player since we've been here. It's hard to get junior college players in with their transcripts to USC. The transfer portal wasn't around at the time. So our goal was to go and try to recruit freshmen, kids in high school, bring them in, develop them and build a program that way vs. going to get transfers, having them sit out a year or grad transfers, etc.

"That was our recruiting pitch -- ‘We’re not very good right now, but come be the reason.’”

Says Capko: "We had talked about it, at the time we could have gotten some good transfers. One high-profile transfer in particular, I'm not going to mention his name, but it just would have been a character issue. It would have been a grad transfer, we just didn't feel good about his character. Andy was like, 'Look, we've got time. We need to build this the right way with the guys who we feel we can coach, who are our guys, who are going to respond to how we want to run a program.'"

That's where Hart and Bland, who both left L.A to play their college ball at Syracuse, came in ...

Bland had spent two seasons as an assistant coach at San Diego State, his first job in college basketball, where he had started recruiting a four-star point guard and top-50 national prospect from Etiwanda High School named Jordan McLaughlin.

McLaughlin would become the first recruit Enfield and his staff signed, and more than that, the start of changing those perceptions about the program locally.

"I don't think the program would be where it is today without Tony Bland. He recruited Jordan McLaughlin, and once we got Jordan McLaughlin, the program was [on the rise]. I tell everybody Jordan McLaughlin was the key to it all, he started it all," Hart says. "I followed up with Bennie Boatwright and Chimezie Metu the next recruiting class and that just took the program to another level and then we were able to start getting respect locally."

Hart had spent just one season as an assistant coach at Pepperdine prior to joining the USC staff, after an extended NBA career, but he proved to be a pivotal hire for Enfield as well.

"They were really enthusiastic to try to turn this thing around quickly and they did a terrific job," Enfield says.

"A couple of the smartest things Andy did was hire Jason and Tony because they were well-liked in L.A., and I think that helped kind of change it," Capko says.

Everybody involved agrees that landing McLaughlin was the moment things started to turn for the program -- even if the results wouldn't show it for a couple years.

"We knew that he was a game-changer," Hart says. "He was the state's best player and we won, I think we [beat out] Indiana and UCLA. That was just huge for the program because at that time no local L.A. talent was going to USC. They were going to Cal and Colorado and Arizona and UCLA."

Says Capko: "Jordan McLaughlin was a game-changer because he did have UCLA and he had some of the big boys. Jordan took a chance on us, and when he got here and we started winning with him I think that helped."

McLaughlin and fellow four-star guard Elijah Stewart, also from the Los Angeles area, were the keys in that initial 2014 recruiting class and would join the program for Enfield's second season, coming together with sophomores Julian Jacobs and Nikola Jovanovic, two productive holdovers recruited by the previous staff.

With Boatwright and Metu, both four-star prospects, coming on board in the 2015 class, the Trojans now had a nucleus of talent entering their third season.

"Chimezie was a super loyal kid. UCLA I don't think ever offered him. You just kind of knew, knowing Chimezie, he was never going to go anywhere away from L.A. Jason recruited him, Jason did a really good job with him," Capko says. "I think Chimezie just liked the fact that we were local, we showed an interest in him, we prioritized him. He's a smart kid. I think he recognized that.

"Bennie showed up one day in the office. I remember Jason being like, 'Bennie's going to come with his dad, he's going to come on an unofficial visit, meet the staff, we'll take him on campus.' He gets here, we show him around campus, he ends up walking Bennie and his dad around, or we all do, and Jason goes, 'I think Bennie's going to commit.' Bennie came back to Andy's office and basically committed on the spot, kind of impromptu. We didn't even see it coming."

The pieces were falling into place and Enfield's plan was following the script, but the pressure to win was mounting after USC went 11-21 and 12-20 in his first two seasons.

"We knew what was expected. It was expected for us to start winning, especially in that Year 3," Enfield says. "If we would not have won Year 3 it would have been a completely different outcome. I wouldn't be sitting here. So yes, there was a lot of pressure -- every day -- but as stressful as that was we knew that we had to stay with it. There was a lot of hard days and a lot of soul searching at times, but my staff was always very enthusiastic with our players, even when we were losing those first two years. We knew we were building for the future."

The breakthrough came that third season with 21 wins and an NCAA tournament appearance and a narrow one-point loss to Providence. The next year, the Trojans made it back to the tourney and beat Providence in a play-in game, followed by a win over SMU and a narrow four-point loss to Baylor in the Round of 32, finishing with a school-record 26 wins.

"There was a lot of validation," Enfield says.

There are also some major what-ifs along the way that the staff still thinks about.

That next season, 2017-18, the Trojans expected to have the kind of team that could now truly compete with the best in the country. They opened the season ranked No. 10 nationally, expecting to be led by three future NBA players in McLaughlin, Metu and De'Anthony Melton, along with Stewart and Boatwright as juniors and emerging sophomores Jonah Mathews and Nick Rakocevic.

But Melton would end up suspended for the whole season while getting tangentially caught up in the FBI sting operation into college basketball recruiting. Federal prosecutors arrested and charged 10 people, including four assistant coaches across the sport -- including Bland -- with fraud and corruption, alleging that bribes were exchanged to steer recruits.

(Bland pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bribery — accepting $4,100 from [Christian] Dawkins to steer players to a financial adviser — and received two years probation, while losing his job at USC, though he told the New York Times "he accepted only $2,100 from Dawkins, a friend for about a decade who told him to enjoy a night out in Las Vegas as a thanks for meeting with the financial adviser" and that he accepted the plea deal as a "business decision." ... Still, Bland is talked about in a positive light within the Trojans program for his contributions in those early years).

The details around the alleged benefits received by a family friend of Melton's were challenged by an L.A. Times report, and the man at the center of the investigation, Christian Dawkins, later gave testimony that Melton received no benefits. But Melton wouldn't get that season back -- leaving for the NBA that summer -- and the Trojans' dreams of a deep NCAA tournament run were further dashed when Boatwright was sidelined by injury. Despite finishing second in the conference and ending up 24-12, USC got relegated to the NIT that postseason.

After dipping to a 16-17 record the next season, Enfield felt his program needed a jolt if it was going to reclaim that trajectory it once seemed to be on -- that it needed to be on for their plan to be able to continue.

"We kind of came back together after that and said we had to be tougher. We didn't feel our team that year was tough, and we tried to build a climate and a culture of toughness, defense and I think you've seen that these last three years where we've been really good defensively," Capko says. "We've maybe taken a step back offensively, but we've been real good defensively and we felt like it's laid the foundation for everything that we've done and all the success that we've had."

Two more what-ifs -- of much different varieties -- were still to come, though.

USC went 22-9 during the 2019-20 season and was poised for a return to the NCAA tournament before the postseason was wiped out due to the onset of the pandemic.

Star freshman Onyeka Okongwu, meanwhile, had turned himself into a one-and-done NBA lottery pick (No. 6 overall), which was a great spotlight for the program ... but a surprise from earlier expectations.

The plan was to have Okongwu and fellow five-star Isaiah Mobley joined the next year by five-star 7-footer Evan Mobley (the No. 3 overall pick in the 2021 NBA Draft), forming what again had the potential to be a true national contender.

"That year we didn't plan on Onyeka being a one-and-done kid. The plan was for Onyeka, Evan and Isaiah all to play together. Onyeka ended up being, to his credit, far better, far faster than what we thought," Capko says. "Now, we signed him because we thought he was going to be a good player, but to be a guy who ended up going sixth a year later, nobody anticipated that, not even him."

And yet that 2020-21 Trojans team still proved to be the group to truly break the program through on the national stage, as USC rolled to the Elite Eight last year as a No. 6 seed, knocking off Drake, Kansas and Oregon before running into the buzzsaw that was No. 1 seed Gonzaga.

The coaches gathered together in the locker room after that loss in Indianapolis, Ind., digesting what had happened, what could have happened and what it all meant for the future.

"I remember sitting there in the locker room after the game being like, man, we honestly felt like we were Final Four good had we not run into Gonzaga [or] Baylor," Capko says. "... Not saying we would have beat Michigan or we would have beat Houston, but we felt like if we played one of those teams we could have made the Final Four. ...

"We felt like we’re close, but we talked about it after. We all sat in the locker room for 20-25 minutes, we were like, 'Man, we were pretty good this year. We were close, we were knocking and we've just got to stick with it.' I think Andy would say this and all of us would say we came back from that more motivated than ever to recruit and try to build this thing and try to get it to that next step because we felt that we were close."

Enfield is known to drop a frequent reminder in press conferences about how far his program has come.

Stats like how USC has won a school-record 73 games over this current three-year stretch, while matching the single-season record for wins again this year with 26. Or that the Trojans are tied for second-most Pac-12 regular-season wins over the last five seasons -- they were first before losing to Arizona and UCLA to close out the regular season. Or that they're third behind Baylor and Kansas for most wins by a power conference team over the last three seasons.

Maybe that stems somewhat from that perception battle the program had to face upon his arrival, or the sting of that 2018 NCAA tournament snub that is still a sore spot.

He's not wrong, though.

Those stats and six 20-win seasons in the last seven years speak to what Enfield ultimately set out to do with this program -- make it consistently successful after what he calls the "perpetual rollercoaster" that was USC basketball history over the last 80 years or so, with sporadic peaks but little sustained success.

But for all stats, metrics and anecdotal evidence -- NBA first-round picks in three straight drafts, six of his former players on NBA rosters this season, etc. -- there was still something missing entering last year, as the Trojans had made just two out of a possible six NCAA tournaments during his first seven years (factoring in the canceled tournament in 2020) and hadn't been beyond the second round.

Internally, Enfield and his staff knew there was still pressure on them to push the program forward, regardless of whatever best-laid plans had come undone in the past.

"It was very important for us to try to make a run in March Madness to show that our program could compete on a national scale," Enfield says. "Even though we had been winning a lot of games the last few years, it made more than Los Angeles realize that we had a good basketball program. From a national respect, for our recruiting, for the future of the program, it was extremely important to make a run like we did last year."

The Trojans made it back into the NCAA tournament this year after a surprising 26-8 season, despite having to replace Evan Mobley and second-leading scorer Tahj Eaddy. The team arguably overachieved, regardless of the first-round loss to Miami on Friday.

USC basketball has momentum both on the court and in recruiting in a way that only seemed like wishful optimism nine years ago.

The Trojans have the No. 9-ranked recruiting class coming in, led by five-star 7-footer Vincent Iwuchukwu, who is originally from San Antonio, Texas, and was coveted by programs across the country. He's the No. 17-ranked overall prospect in the 2022 class while four-star forward commit Kijani Wright is ranked No. 52.

"We're now able to recruit very strongly regionally, Southern California, and also nationally, which was extremely hard to do prior to our success," Enfield says. "... Before, we were calling to try to find good players to get them interested in USC. Now, our success sells itself and now we have to turn players away that are really good players because we just don't have enough scholarships."

Says Hart, who left USC after last season to become head coach of the NBA's G League Ignite: "I take tremendous pride. I know I helped establish something. ... I helped establish a program to get to an elite level. Because I'm from L.A. I grew up right around the corner from here and I didn't go [to USC] because it wasn't where it was, so I can truly say that we helped start something and now hopefully the [fans] will support year in and year out."

That is Enfield's hope too, to continue building toward becoming what he calls a "true top 25 program” in all regards -- one that consistently gets the kind of student crowds that started coming out in force this season, that is viewed nationally as a perennial postseason threat.

So, no, he never wanted to be anywhere else but USC -- especially considering how much work it took to get the program to this point, and that there is a shared belief within the basketball offices that the best is still yet to come for the program in the future.

Enfield gave Capko a heads up the day before his extension was announced to let him know that nothing was changing. The plan they put in place nine years ago continues -- only with heightened expectations.

"I congratulated him, told him that's awesome, I'm happy to be here, let's just keep building this thing and just keep it going, stay here for the rest of our careers. Because you don't get to do that often," Capko says. "I think all of us are comfortable here and we've got the program in a good spot. That's what more than anything, who wants to go anywhere and rebuild? We've got this program in a really good spot. He was excited, he was pumped up, I was excited, the whole staff was excited and super appreciative of Mike and Brandon.

"Now it's just time to keep this thing going and try to get it to the Final Four and see what we can do behind that. That's the next step for us is a Final Four and knocking on the door of sustained national relevancy. It's hard to do nowadays because the way kids leave and come and go, it's harder than ever to build that continuity, but we feel like we're in a great spot to do it."