LOS ANGELES – Andy Enfield learned to shoot a basketball soon after he learned to walk.
His parents fashioned a metal hoop onto the back of a cottage chair that sat in the dining room of their central Pennsylvania home. He was 2 years old.
“Well,” said his mother, Barbara Enfield, “he was very precocious.”
A couple years later, a nerf basket hung from his bedroom door. That way, it was a little higher up.
He kept growing, of course.
His father, Bill Enfield, who was also the ninth-grade boys basketball coach at nearby Shippensburg High School, put together a concrete mini court in the backyard during his pre-teen years. Andy can still recite the dimensions: 17 feet facing the basket, 10 feet out to each of the corners. He spent hours there.
“If I missed a day during the year, it was probably three feet of snow outside,” he smiled.
Enfield first gained widespread attention in 2013 for leading unheralded Florida Gulf Coast to the NCAA Tournament’s round of 16, the first-ever 15th seed to advance that far. His team played at a frenetic pace and finished with a flurry of highlight-inducing slams.
“Dunk City,” the Eagles were branded.
But the hallmark of Enfield, now leading USC’s resurgent men’s basketball program for a fourth season, has long been shooting.
He used it as the pitch to one of his first NBA clients, Walt Williams, on a summer day at Maryland’s Cole Field House in 1993. Williams watched Enfield make somewhere between 30 or 40 shots in a row. That was the sell. He hired Enfield as his personal shooting coach.
It was how Enfield established himself as an assistant coach and later through a series of instructional videos.
In 1994, the Milwaukee Bucks hired him before the season. Their budget was low, then-Coach and General Manager Mike Dunleavy Sr., said. They agreed on a small base salary as a result. But if Enfield could improve a player’s free-throw percentage by more than five percent, the young assistant would net a bonus.
“He probably doubled his salary,” Dunleavy said.
Dunleavy pointed to his work with Vin Baker, Milwaukee’s dominant low-post scorer, who shot 59 percent from the foul line in the 1994-95 season, the first under Enfield’s direction. The second season, Baker made 67 percent.
Enfield was next hired as a full-time assistant by the Boston Celtics.
Professional players instinctively were reticent about altering their shooting form. It remained their identity, and after all, hadn’t it worked until then?
“It’s definitely the most personal,” Enfield said. “It’s like a fingerprint.”
Dunleavy remarked that players grew receptive to Enfield despite his minimal coaching experience.
“His main credential was he could get the ball in the basket,” Dunleavy said.
As a sharpshooter at Division III Johns Hopkins, he set an NCAA career record for free-throw percentage (92.5), when he made 431 of 466 through his senior season in 1991. It was later broken.
Enfield tried to be pointed with players and highlight specific tendencies. He used video recordings to counsel players at a time when it was far less common. When he first joined the Bucks in 1994, Enfield used a VHS camcorder to capture players’ shooting form. After a period of time, he offered corrections, they adjusted their form, and Enfield recorded again.
Afterward, the coach and the players would review the before and after shots.
It became the same frame-by-frame process he brought to Florida Gulf Coast, igniting the start-up program. Dunk City emerged as only part of the equation. The Eagles could also shoot.
“People just focus on the dunks,” Enfield said, “which are nice, but the only reason you can dunk the ball is you’re spacing the floor and you can actually get to the rim.”
Court spacing came with shooting ability. Both precede the flurry of finishes.
As he first did with the Bucks during their NBA Summer League practices in 1994, Enfield guides his USC players through the same ritual each offseason.
When freshmen arrive for summer workouts, Martin Bahar, a scouting and video director for the Trojans, records them hoisting attempts at the basket from several angles. The footage is uploaded onto SportsCode Gamebreaker, a laptop application.
Then review begins, and Enfield’s focus centers on two main issues.
He starts with off-hand positioning, where a player’s non-shooting hand interferes with the flight of the shot.
Jordan McLaughlin, a junior guard for the Trojans, faced such a problem when he arrived as a freshman.
As the right-handed McLaughlin prepared to shoot, his left thumb was also pushing the ball.
“It was basically like I was shooting with six fingers, rather than just five,” McLaughlin said.
In these cases, Enfield instructs players to work out with a shooting strap, a black velcro device that wraps around the elbow of their off-arm and thumb. Acting like a seatbelt, it restrains the opposite thumb from pushing the ball or the arm from moving past a 90-degree angle.
“At first, it feels weird,” sophomore forward Chimezie Metu said. “I don’t think you ever really get used to it.”
Metu, like McLaughlin, had a pesky left hand that wouldn’t stay out of the way. Plus, in high school, his that non-shooting hand would also turn toward the basket instead of remaining by the side.
“It would affect the rotation of the ball,” Metu said. “The ball just wasn’t going straight.”
The shooting strap stayed on for several weeks before his freshman season, and Enfield sympathized.
“That was my problem when I was younger,” Enfield said.
He never used the strap, though, not learning about the device until he met its developer, Jay Wolf, while the two were running clinics more than a decade ago.
After some time with the strap, the goal is that muscle memory kicks in.
“After you’ve been shooting with it for so long, it’s kind of like you don’t even need it there anymore,” said Nick Rakocevic, a freshman center who used the strap in the offseason. “You just go and get reps and so it becomes kind of clockwork for you.”
Without a meddlesome off-hand, the ball rotates with more backspin, allowing for a more favorable bounce around the rim, and a straighter path.
Metu also faced another common ailment. The release point of his shot came from behind his head.
Enfield encouraged him to bring the ball a few extra inches forward. It is no sling shot.
When the Trojans played without sophomore forward Bennie Boatwright, regarded as their top offensive player, for 15 consecutive games with a knee injury earlier this season and remained in contention for an NCAA Tournament berth, McLaughlin and Metu assumed larger roles on offense.
Metu averages a team-high 14.2 points per game and McLaughlin is not far behind at 12.9.
Both have proven capable and emerged as efficient scorers.
On two-point jump shots, Metu is shooting 54.4 percent, including 46.5 percent on two-point jump shots, according to hoop-math.com. Last season, Metu shot 36.1 percent on two-point jumpers. That has also come despite taking more shots away from the rim.
McLaughlin, who shot 27.2 percent from 3-point range as a freshman, is above 40 percent for a second straight season.
When Enfield recruited them, he often mentioned his shooting background during introductions, and players said they sought the assistance.
When McLaughlin visited as a high school senior in 2013, he sat on the couch in Enfield’s Galen Center office and watched about 10 minutes from a selection of the coach’s old instructional videos.
Paul Pierce, then playing for the Celtics, made an appearance in one.
“He worked with people you’re trying to get to,” McLaughlin said. “That’s always an eye-popper.”
Junior guard Elijah Stewart said he found a tape on his own that showed Enfield working with Dwyane Wade.
“The camera video was pretty bad,” he quipped. “It looked like it was recorded with a toaster.”
Not all players overhauled their shooting form. Count Stewart among that group. He mostly avoided the shooting strap, making minor alterations such as a more consistent follow-through.
“Every player has different flaws,” Enfield said.
For Enfield, who grew up shooting, he has long been eager to uncover them.
Contact the writer: jkaufman@scng.com
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