Fast-paced offense and a lot of turnovers defensively are the main focus of Trojan Basketball practice (photo credit Alexander Wowra)

Following a fan event on Sunday and Monday's day off, the USC men's basketball team returned for a long, intensive practice session Tuesday. With the season opener only ten days away, for coach Enfield it was important to get back into gear as quickly as possible. 

As a major part of Tuesday's practice, the team played an extensive intra squad scrimmage, which was mainly focused on defensive execution.

Enfield pointed out that the team's transition defense has been lacking a little bit as the players didn’t create enough deflections and steals, which is essential to the new fast-paced system he is trying to instill.  "That’s a big part of our system we have to define," he noted. 

Overall, the Trojan head coach found the defensive progress to be "about average" at this point and indicated that he will concentrate on getting players to stop playing "with their hands down on the sides instead of being active," in order to create more turnovers.  "It needs to take another jump in the next week and a half before we open up," said Enfield. 

Sophomore guard Chass Bryan was in agreement with Enfield. In order to fully adopt the new coach's up-tempo offensive system, "we just gotta pick up our intensity, because we want to run a lot, and to run you gotta get rebounds and deflections and steals," he said.

Overall, he found that the team was adjusting well and that the new system was a good fit for the team. He explained that everyone is picking up the pace that Enfield envisions and wished that his team "could have implemented this system a bit earlier than this year, so we would have done better [last season]."

With D.J. Haley back, the team is currently at full strength and hoping to stay healthy for the opening game against Utah State on Friday, Nov. 8.

Reach Staff Writer Alexander Wowra here.