Name: Andy Enfield Resume: USC Men's Basketball Head Coach and Founder of All Net Basketball
Sport at USC: Men's Basketball
Take us through your previous experiences in the business field. What did you do right out of college?
I worked for Anderson Consulting out of college which was a business consulting company. Then, I went back to business school and got my Master's in business and an MBA in finance at the University of Maryland. After that I got into coaching through my business, All Net Basketball, and did NBA consulting and coaching, specializing in shooting techniques and offensive moves. I built a business around my company where I would have All Net shooting camps and clinics as well as individual players that I coached. I was then hired by the Milwaukee Bucks as a shooting coach and spent two years there. When I left Milwaukee I returned to focusing on my All Net Basketball business. I was able to get more clients and expand my company.
Now, you also worked for a start-up company. When did you get involved with that?
After spending two years coaching in Boston, I moved to New York City where I still had my All Net Basketball business, but at the same time I was involved with a startup company called TractManager. I was fortunate to work with some brilliant people. It was a very young company, but the CEO and President were really just brilliant people. I tried to contribute everything that I could to help take a company that was in the beginning stages and help it grow so that it would eventually become a profitable company. That was a great experience in the business world because I understood the value of working with brilliant people. They were terrific managers and everyone in the company had a lot of responsibility so it was great. No matter what your so-called title was you all worked together.Â
What would you say you learned the most from your business experiences that you try to incorporate into your style of coaching?Â
It's who you work with, that's a big difference. You need great leaders and leadership. I think that in the business and sports world the leadership is very similar because you really are a team. Everyone has a role on that team and I've been in different positions among that team. Now I'm the head coach so it is different than some of the roles I've had in the business world or even as an assistant coach but everyone has to have the same agenda. There has to be a culture within the business or culture within the basketball program that everyone's comfortable with. When people show up every day, they need to be energized to want to achieve a goal. I think there's a lot of similarities between the sports and the business world. I mean sports itself is a business, even though the day-to-day activities may be different, there are still a lot of similarities.Â
What other business practices have you brought into coaching?
The second thing is the culture of the work environment. Are people showing up everyday excited to be there and ready to achieve something as a team? A lot of that has to do with leadership, who is the one setting the culture? However, everyone can be a part of that culture. Â Even though they aren't the head coach, I expect everyone who works in this office to be a part of it. The best thing that ever happened to me when I was an assistant coach or when I was working for upper management was that I was given a lot of responsibility. Â I always appreciated my managers or head coaches asking me to do stuff for them which I would respond with a smile on my face and I'd get it done. Everyone who works in an environment like this wants to feel like they are a part of the bigger picture so that they can feel like they've contributed to the success.Â
Do you think that you've brought your own personal brand from all of your past experiences that you are trying to implement here?
Every place is different. I'm a big believer that if you have a goal then you show up every day of every week and you work towards it. At some places it takes a shorter amount of time and sometimes it takes a little longer but as long as you have that goal, that drive and that culture within your program then things usually work out. However, we want to enjoy this process too. Pat Haden has done an amazing job of creating a culture within the USC Athletics programs. It is an unbelievable place to work. We're just trying to do our part in the basketball program to match what he's done and fall in line with what he's doing but also create our own little niche because it is different from every other sport. USC Athletics for all of us is just an unbelievable place to work.Â
I hate to ask this question, but what's next?
We have our goals. We would like to be a top 25 team competing for Pac-12 championships, competing for national championships and that's very realistic but it takes a lot of hard work to get there. That's why I think that culture, that drive, and that teamwork is so important because we're not going to get there unless everyone's on the same page. So what's next? We're working towards that every day, every week that we show up in the offices and we're excited to do that.
