I’d be willing to bet that 2013 marks the first year that “Johns Hopkins” and “basketball powerhouse” ever appeared in the same sentence — and even then, it’s not in reference to our beloved Blue Jays, but instead to the Hopkins alum who’s become the NCAA tournament’s most unlikely star. He’s smart, handsome, and good at what he does. And I can’t help wanting to punch him in the face, for no particular reason.
Andy Enfield, class of 1991, played basketball for Johns Hopkins for four years and set 16 records in the process. He was the first player from the school’s team to earn an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship, which he used to go to business school — another thing he was really good at.
“[Enfield is] a charmed prince of a guy, by all accounts, who could have retired in his 30s after amassing sufficient riches as co-founder of a health care-related technology company,” the Washington Post points out. “Instead, Andy Enfield, a Johns Hopkins graduate who earned an MBA in finance at the University of Maryland, abandoned Wall Street and, accompanied by his lingerie-model bride who put her own high-wattage career on hold, headed south to chase a dream of coaching basketball.”
It was a bold move, but it worked out well, because that’s what happens for Enfield: These days, he’s the head coach of Florida Gulf Coast, the previously-unheard-of team that recently became the first-ever 15 seed to make it into the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen round. This is the stuff of Hollywood underdog sports team movies; throw in the fact that Enfield’s wife is a former lingerie model, and I bet someone’s already optioning the script. (In other news: Want to buy his house? No one else will.)
