Fishers Coach Garrett Winegar Leaves HS for Iowa United Prep Staff

Fishers athletics enters the offseason without the coach who built the state's most dominant program of the past three years. Garrett Winegar compiled a 132-25 record across six seasons, won the 2024 IHSAA Class 4A state title 65-56 over Ben Davis, and went 83-3 in his final three years combined, a stretch that ended not with a state final but with a 50-49 sectional loss to Carmel in his last game on the Tigers bench.

Indianapolis Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep confirmed the move after Peegs.com's Jeff Rabjohns first reported it on March 16. Winegar informed his players that Monday. He is joining Iowa United Prep in Des Moines as the program's freshman/sophomore coach, while Keith Smart, the Indiana University legend who hit a 16-foot baseline jumper with seconds remaining to give the Hoosiers a 74-73 win over Syracuse in the 1987 NCAA Championship, will lead the junior/senior team as head coach.

The timing matters for Fishers. The Tigers finished 24-1 in 2025-26, won the Hoosier Crossroads Conference, and averaged 18.4 points per game in victory while ranked No. 1 in Indiana and No. 5 nationally in the Massey Rankings before Carmel ended their season. That result, layered on top of Winegar's exit, leaves Fishers tasked with filling a head coaching vacancy while protecting a roster capable of competing for another Class 4A title. Player retention and staff continuity will be priority items before summer workouts begin. Carmel, which already beat Fishers once this season, and rivals across the Hoosier Crossroads Conference will be watching the hire closely.

The culture and infrastructure Winegar built do not leave with him. He left behind four conference titles, a state championship, and a runner-up game that required overtime before Jeffersonville won 67-66, the markers of a program that was largely anonymous before his 2020-21 arrival. The next coach inherits that expectation alongside the blueprint.

Iowa United Prep, founded and owned by Des Moines entrepreneur Mark Scharnberg, who led the pursuit of Winegar, operates out of a renovated 73,000-square-foot warehouse on the city's south side. The facility houses multiple courts, a training center, and locker rooms. Twelve staffers teach and train student-athletes full-time, and Scharnberg invests approximately $125,000 to $150,000 per athlete per year in a model he compares to European-style academies. Athletes compete in 70 games annually: 35 PREP competitions on the Nike EYBL Scholastic circuit and 35 AAU games on the Adidas Gold 3SGB circuit, the kind of national exposure pipeline that public school athletic departments cannot replicate.

A Rochester, Indiana native, Winegar studied sports journalism at Indiana University before beginning his coaching career as a seventh-grade coach at Jackson Creek Middle School in Bloomington from 2013 to 2015. He then assisted Bloomington South under J.R. Holmes, the IHSAA's all-time winningest coach, and later joined Warren Central's staff, where he was part of the Warriors' 2018 Class 4A state championship. He went 18-6 as Warren Central's head coach before Fishers hired him.

His tenure earned him a spot on the Naismith Boys High School Coach of the Year Watch List, one of 10 coaches nationwide and one of only two from public schools, and the Indiana Basketball Coaches Association named him its 2025 Bob King Coach of the Year.

Smart's NBA résumé spans three franchises, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Golden State Warriors, and Sacramento Kings, and he is a member of the Indiana University Athletics Hall of Fame. For Winegar, a sports journalism graduate of IU who built every coaching credit he has inside Indiana, the pairing with Smart closes one chapter and opens another, this one in Des Moines.