Wes Enis

Twenty three players in Division I men’s college basketball have made 100 or more 3-pointers in the 2025-26 season.

Wes Enis was one of them.

The Miami East High School graduate from Conover, a community on Route 36 between Piqua and St. Paris, reached the milestone in his first season at the Division I level. Enis made 100 of 273 3-pointers (36.6%) in 29 regular-season games for South Florida, setting the school’s single-season record. His teammate, Joseph Pinion, also made 100 3s.

Enis, a 6-foot-2 junior guard, made the American Conference first team on Tuesday. The Bulls (23-8, 15-3) won the regular-season championship and take a nine-game winning streak into the conference tournament this weekend in Birmingham, Ala.

“I feel really good,” Enis said Tuesday. “We’re playing really good basketball. We’re playing together. There’s just a lot of love in the room at all times. It’s easy playing with your brothers.”

South Florida needs to win two games to secure its fourth NCAA tournament bid and first since 2012.

“It would mean a lot to me and my teammates,” Enis said. “I know it’s a goal of ours, and we’re working really hard every day to try to accomplish that goal.”

South Florida has a 20% chance of earning an at-large bid if it doesn’t win the American tournament. Ken Pomeroy gives South Florida a 47.3% chance of winning the championship. As the No. 1 seed, it received a bye to the semifinals and will play at 3 p.m. Saturday.

Enis found a home at South Florida after two seasons at Lincoln Memorial University, a Division II program in Harrogate, Tenn.

Enis was named the South Atlantic Conference Freshman of the Year in 2023-24 after averaging 17.9 points per game. As a sophomore, he won South Atlantic Conference Player and Defensive Player of the Year awards, averaging 20.3 points per game. He scored 1,002 points in two seasons.

“I think it was a great place for me to begin,” Enis said of his first school.

Enis credited Lincoln Memorial coach Jeremiah Samarrippas, who’s now an assistant coach at Wofford, for believing in him and giving him a chance at Lincoln Memorial.

“It was a really good, high-level D-II school, which is a lot better than some low-major D-I schools,” Enis said, “so I was able to kind of fine tune my craft down there and stay in the gym.”

Credit: Stephen Galvin

Credit: Stephen Galvin

Enis put up big numbers at Miami East, too. As a sophomore in the 2021-22 season, he averaged 19.5 points per game. A season later, he averaged 21.9.

Still, Enis was, in his own words, “a zero-star prospect,” who was “largely ignored by Division I recruiters,” according to a story on the South Florida website.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Enis said. “I like being the underdog.”

Enis took college-credit courses and graduated early from Miami East. He didn’t play his senior season. Instead, he enrolled at Lincoln Memorial in December 2023. He sat on the bench for one game and made his debut on Dec. 30 that season.

After two seasons at the Division II level, Enis entered the transfer portal, looking for a D-I opportunity.

“It was a pretty unique experience,” he said. “You see the D-I lifestyle, the visits and so forth and whatnot. There were a lot of schools. It was very hectic.”

Enis said South Florida coach Bryan Hodgson recruited him hard.

“He made it very clear he wanted me in a bad way,” Enis said. “He wanted me to have a lot of freedom. He would call me constantly, text me, text my agent. There was just a lot of love from this end. I knew they wanted me here.”

The Florida weather helped make the decision even easier.

“It’s awesome,” Enis said. “My mom texts me all the time when she’s back in Ohio and there are snow storms. I’m like, ‘It’s 75 degrees down here. I don’t know.’”

Enis credits his mom, Holli, for taking him to many workouts and practices when he was younger and even rebounding for him as he shot.

His father, Curtis Enis, an All-American running back at Penn State who played three seasons in the NFL with the Chicago Bears, gets credit for helping him develop his 3-point shot. Curtis suggested Wes, who is ambidextrous, starting shooting with his left hand in eighth grade.

“I did a whole bunch of reps,” Wes said. “I had to restart my whole shot, basically, because I shot right-handed all the way up until eighth grade. It was every day getting shots up, making shots every single day.”

That work has continued in college basketball.

“In my relatively short 18 years in the business, Wes Enis is absolutely one of the top-five hardest workers I’ve been around,” Bulls assistant coach Jamie Quarles told Joey Johnston, of GoUSFBulls.com. “He didn’t shoot it great early in the year. But watching the way he works, you knew that it would eventually translate into him having a really, really good season.

“In our first conversations with Wes, when we got off a Zoom conversation with him, I remember our coaching staff being around a conference table and everybody saying, ‘Whoa! This dude here is a worker. We need to do whatever we can to get this dude in our program.’ I mean, there were telltale signs.”

Enis shot 30% from 3-point range in November and 33% in December. He shot 41.7% in January, twice setting a school record with 10 3s in a game, and 35.5 in February. In three games this month, he has made 11 of 28 3s (39.3%).

“I just continue to work and trust in my work,” Enis said. “God gave me the ability to play basketball, but my coaches and teammates put a lot of trust in me day in and day out.”