Fishers boys basketball Head Coach Garrett Winegar had his team’s attention during the break between the third and fourth quarters of the Class 4A state championship game.
Winegar had just watched defending champion Ben Davis rally from an eight-point deficit early in the third to take a 48-46 lead in the final minute of the quarter.
“I told our guys it was a toughness issue,” Winegar said. “For a stretch there, they were a lot tougher than we were. I told them if they want a blue ring, it’s going to come down to toughness.”
After cutting the Ben Davis lead to 48-47 heading into the final quarter, Winegar’s Tigers responded by scoring the first six points of the fourth quarter and rolled to a 65-56 victory.
It’s the first state championship for the program, which was making its first appearance in the state finals since 1922. The current incarnation of Fishers High School opened in 2007.
The duo of Keenan Gardner and JonAnthony Hall carried the scoring load for the Tigers (29-1), with Hall turning in a 23-point, 10-rebound performance, while Garner had 19 points and 10 boards.
Those two combined for the quick spurt to open the fourth quarter. Garner gave the Tigers a 49-48 lead with a slam dunk, before Hall followed with a steal and dunk, then scored on a layup after a Ben Davis turnover.
It seemed the Giants (23-6) never recovered.
“I thought we had them on the ropes,” interim Ben Davis Coach Corey Taylor said. “Then we had two bad possessions to start the fourth quarter and that hurt us. We never seemed to regain traction after that.”
Just a quarter earlier, the Giants had all the momentum.
Fishers led 36-28 at halftime, and held a 41-32 lead with 6:48 left in the third.
At that point the Giants showed why they were defending champs. Ben Davis scored the next nine points to tie the game at 41-41, before K.J. Windham later scored five straight points to give his team that 48-46 lead.
“We had done a really good job to that point,” Taylor said of his team. “But the back-to-back turnovers to start the fourth – we did things that were uncharacteristic of us.”
Windham came into the contest as Ben Davis’s leading scorer with a 16-point average, but that burst late in the third quarter proved to be his best stretch of the night. He finished with 11 points and shot only 4 of 15 from the field.
“We had to make good on our close-outs and not give Windham open shots,” Winegar said. “We did a great job of making things difficult for him.”
Junior Mark Zachary led the Giants with 14 points, while Ramone Enis added 11 and Mark White 10.
Taden Metzger chipped in with 10 points for the Tigers.
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.
Perdue’s on-court achievements include the Most Improved Award as a junior and IBCA Academic All-State honorable mention. He also has been involved in various organizations such as Riley Dance Marathon. He excels academically with a 4.01 GPA, and has achieved honor roll status all four years of high school.
He is the son of Ryan and Melissa Perdue of Fishers, and will either attend Purdue or Elmhurst with a plan to major in business.
The Indiana Pacers and Indiana Fever, the presenting sponsors of the IHSAA boys basketball state tournament, presented a $1,000 scholarship to the general scholarship fund at Fishers High School in the name of Parker Perdue.
The award is named in honor of the late Arthur L. Trester, who served as the first IHSAA commissioner from 1929 to 1944 as a guiding force after the Great Depression.
