GREENFIELD — Greenfield-Central has found its new basketball coach.
The Cougars on Friday morning officially introduced their new coach, Luke Meredith, who has been an assistant coach at Avon High School.
“It’s very humbling,” Meredith said. “I’m very excited for this opportunity. Being able to meet the team and meet the great people of the Greenfield-Central community just motivates me even more to want be successful and do things right on and off the court for these guys, the administration, the teachers, the players.”
The Greenfield-Central job will be Meredith’s first head-coaching position, but he has a long coaching background at big basketball programs in Indiana.
A 2001 Beech Grove graduate, Meredith then graduated from Ball State University and moved into the teaching and coaching world. He has coached for over a decade, spending time as JV coach and freshman coach at Ben Davis; as seventh-grade coach at Avon Middle School South; and as assistant freshman coach, head freshman coach and varsity assistant coach at Avon High School.
He started in the Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference, then went to the Hoosier Crossroads Conference, and now he becomes a head coach in the Hoosier Heritage Conference.
The Cougars and Meredith had plenty of familiarity with one another before the hiring process began. Meredith was the one who scouted the Cougars for Avon before the teams would play against each another. He also had interviewed for the head coaching position at Greenfield-Central previously.
“He’s a very established assistant coach at a very good 4A program,” Greenfield-Central athletic director Jared Manning said. “He has a lot of roots in the Indy area. He knows a lot about our school because we’ve played each other over the course of the past few years. We’re excited to have him for the energy he’s going to bring, the focus he’s going to have on building our culture and getting kids to buy in to the program. He has a great understanding of what it’s going to take, even without being a head coach. You can tell he’s coached under some very good head coaches.”
Meredith stood out to the Greenfield-Central administration for a variety of reasons. He beat out more than 40 applicants for the position, and was given a two-year contract with a stipend of $9,240.
“In the conversations that we’ve had with him, the positive direction that we felt he could move our program in was a huge deal,” Manning said. “In one of his interviews he talked about the juice he’s going to bring, the energy, the passion he has to get this thing moving in the right direction. That’s something that we really took to heart and we’re really excited about.”
The Cougars’ new coach takes the helm of a team that finished 4-20 this year but returns most of its core for 2019-20, including the entire starting lineup.
That’s not a new situation for Meredith. Two years ago, Avon went 5-20. This year, the Orioles finished 15-10 and won a sectional championship before falling to New Palestine in the regional.
Meredith said he was looking for a community that would be great for his sons, Carter, 8, and Cole, 6. His wife, Jessica, works downtown at IU Health.
He’ll start full-time at Greenfield-Central in August, teaching English/language arts. Coaching-wise, he will start this Tuesday with the limited contact period.
Although he knows many of the Cougars players and what they’ve done to this point, it’s important to Meredith that he comes in with a clean slate. He said he knows the team has a ton of potential, and he’s ready to start building a winning program.
“My job and my goal is obviously to have an opportunity to cut down some nets, compete for some championships, but also to develop championship men,” he said. “I’m ready to get to work. My theme I’m going to talk about is build, believe, belong. I’ve got to get the community to believe. My job is to build it, and I want the kids to feel like they belong in our conference and our sectional. I’m going to bring energy and enthusiasm into this program.
“Like I told everyone in the interview process, I will not be out-worked, and neither will our kids.”