Irvington Prep Academy hires Chris Scott as boys basketball coach

Irvington Prep bet on a coach whose reputation is built on buy-in, accountability and winning the hard way. Chris Scott arrived with 10 years of Indiana high school basketball experience and a résumé that already includes two Class 3A sectional championships, two JV conference titles and one freshman conference championship, a strong signal that Irvington Prep is not settling for maintenance mode after back-to-back nine-win seasons.

The Ravens already showed they can taste the postseason payoff. Irvington Prep won a Class 2A sectional title in the 2023-24 season, and now the question is whether Scott can turn that burst into a repeatable standard. That is the real stakes here: roster buy-in, a tougher daily practice environment and a style that makes Irvington Prep harder to play against in February than it was in November.

Scott’s path has been long enough to matter and varied enough to fit a rebuild. He has served as a varsity head coach at Lew Wallace High School, Charter Dunes High School and Geo Academy High School, and he also spent five years as a JV head coach at Lew Wallace, Irvington Preparatory Academy during the 2018-19 season and Riverside High School. More recently, he had been an assistant at Crispus Attucks before Irvington Community Schools approved him for the job. That mix matters because Irvington Prep is not looking for a one-year jolt. It is looking for a program builder.

That job also fits the school’s identity. Irvington Preparatory Academy is a 2A IHSAA school established in 2002 in downtown Irvington, just east of Indianapolis, and its athletics mission centers on teamwork, sportsmanship and educational opportunity for students in grades 9-12. The coaching posting, dated April 1, 2026, called for a leader who would develop self-discipline, character, teamwork and leadership, which is basically a checklist for the kind of culture Scott has been hired to install. Joanna Wiggins, Irvington Community Schools’ athletic director, is handling the program.

If Scott’s track record travels, Irvington Prep could become more than a pesky sectional team. Over the next two seasons, the Ravens have a chance to move from a good run to a defined identity, one where discipline shows up in close games, competitiveness shows up on the road and Indianapolis-area opponents start treating Irvington Prep like a real problem, not just a team with a nice recent result.