Covington Catholic High School named UC men’s basketball assistant and former standout colonel Jake Thelen your new basketball coach.
He replaces Scott Ruthsatz, who resigned after 13 seasons.
“Jake Thelen has done an outstanding job for us in Cincinnati the last three years,” UC Bearcats men’s basketball head coach Wes Miller said. “He will be greatly missed. CovCath is hiring a great, young coach. He is ready to be a head coach. The work he has done with our players… guiding them, helping them grow and mature, to become better players. It will be really cool to watch him do that with his own program.”
A native of Edgewood, Kentucky, Thelen starred at CovCath and graduated in 2011. He was selected to play in the Kentucky/Indiana and Kentucky/Ohio All-Star games before embarking on an All-American career at Bellarmine University and gaining coaching. experience at three major Division I basketball programs.
Thelen most recently served as director of player development/assistant coach for the University of Cincinnati men’s basketball team.
Before joining UC, Thelen was director of basketball operations at the University of Georgia. He was the youngest director of basketball operations at a Power-Five school when he arrived in Athens at age 25. His coordination on campus helped the Bulldogs land a consensus top-10 class in coach Tom Crean’s first full recruiting cycle.
That group was led by Anthony Edwards, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft and one of the top six prospects Georgia signed during Thelen’s tenure in Athens. Edwards led Minnesota to the Western Conference Finals in the NBA Playoffs last month.
Thelen finished his Colonels playing career with a scoring average of 16.6 points per game and is the eighth all-time leading scorer in Covington Catholic basketball history with 1,258 points. He also holds the school single-game record with 18 field goals.
Thelen was an All-American forward at Bellarmine University, where he finished 16th among Bellarmine’s career scoring leaders with 1,412 points in three seasons. As a senior, he recorded the second-most points (651) and rebounds (375) in school history, averaging a double-double of 18.6 ppg and 10.7 rebounds per game.
Thelen was a consensus All-American and was named GLVC Player of the Year in 2015. Thelen was named first-team All-America by Basketball Times, DII Bulletin, the National Association of Basketball Coaches and BennettRank.com.
This article originally appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer: Covington Catholic names UC assistant as new basketball coach
