Fishers Boys Basketball Team Taps Their Inner Strength

Last March, toward the end of the third quarter of the IHSAA Class 4A state championship basketball game, Fishers High School Coach Garrett Winegar told his team that winning was going to come down to toughness. Ben Davis had rallied from an eight-point deficit to take a 48-46 lead, but the Tigers weren’t done yet.

Winegar’s team stormed back in the fourth quarter to roll to a 65-56 state championship victory.

But the Fishers High School basketball team didn’t get there alone – and didn’t overcome that third-quarter struggle – without Dr. Rob Bell. He holds a Ph.D. in sport psychology from the University of Tennessee, and an M.Ed. in sport psychology and kinesiology from Temple University. A renowned mental toughness coach, Bell has decades of experience with elite athletes, top executives and high-performing teams. His work with Olympic medalists, PGA Tour champions, Grand Slam tennis winners, Indy 500 champions, and now the Tigers, underscores his ability to foster success at the highest levels of competition and performance.

“This was Coach Winegar’s vision and his team,” Bell says. “That’s where this all started. He had a vision about what the team and culture looked like, and mental training is part of that. Mental toughness is how we deal with adversity and setbacks. We developed stronger one-on-one relationships amongst the team, strengthened leadership roles, and improved communication between players, and players and coaches.”

Two of Bell’s biggest focal points during the 2023-2024 season were working with the team on how they were going to respond to adversity, and how to play well under pressure.

“Having players in the right spot from a leadership perspective, and empowering them to be leaders and hold each other accountable, is the foundation,” Bell says.

On Mondays, Winegar and Bell would lead an exercise called Awaken the Tiger. This section of practice was dedicated to mental training: focusing on breathing, letting go of mistakes, refocusing and visualizing success. Through this, the team developed standards to set in place, endeavoring to perform at a level the players set for themselves day in and day out.

Other tools Winegar and Bell implemented were how to untangle tying a performance to your identity, being able to move on from mistakes by refocusing, owning mistakes, and having a strategy in place to get to the next play, whether in practice or a game.

It’s no surprise, then, that following the game, members of the IHSAA Executive Committee named Parker Perdue of Fishers High School as the winner of the Arthur L. Trester Mental Attitude Award in Class 4A Boys Basketball.

The award is presented annually to a senior participant in each classification who was nominated by his principal and coach, and has demonstrated excellence in mental attitude, scholarship, leadership and athletic ability.

Known for his practical and direct approach, Bell grounds his discussions in personal experiences that include completing 100-mile ultra marathons and IRONMAN competitions, as well as caddying in over 20 PGA Tour events. These experiences, combined with the insights shared on his popular podcast “The Mental Toughness Podcast with Dr. Rob Bell”, enrich his presentations, providing real-world applications of his theories on mental toughness.