By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
Covington Catholic is giving one of its former basketball players his first chance to be a head coach with the Colonels.
Jake Thelen, a 2011 graduate, returns to CovCath after spending the last three years with the University of Cincinnati basketball program as Director of Player Development. He became an assistant on head coach Wes Miller’s staff last season.
“CovCath is getting a great young coach,” Miller said in a video posted online. “He’s ready to be a head coach. But more important than that, the job he did with our players, mentoring them, helping them grow and mature, helping them become better players. It’ll be really neat to watch him do that with his own program.”
Thelen was hired to replace CovCath’s most successful coach, Scott Ruthsatz, who resigned two weeks ago to devote more time to his family business. The Colonels won two state championships, six 9th Region titles and compiled a 363-79 record over the last 13 seasons under Ruthsatz.
During his high school career, Thelen averaged 16.6 points per game as a center and forward for CovCath. He scored 1,258 points, which ranks eighth on the team’s all-time scoring list. He set a single-game record with 18 field goals.
Thelen was an NCAA Division II All-American forward at Bellarmine University, where the former 6-foot-6 forward ranks No. 16 among career scoring leaders with 1,412 points in three seasons. He was named the Great Lakes Valley Conference Player of the Year in 2015.
After college, Thelen was an assistant coach at Louisville St. Xavier High School in 2015-16, a graduate assistant at Indiana University in 2016-17 and an assistant coach at Bellarmine in 2017-18.
At age 25, Thelen became the youngest director of basketball operations at a Power 5 school when he arrived at Georgia. He helped the Bulldogs land a consensus top-10 class in head coach Tom Crean’s first full recruiting cycle. That group was headlined by Anthony Edwards, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft.
Thelen left the Georgia job to be closer to home at the University of Cincinnati and now he gets the chance to be head coach at his former high school. CovCath has three starters returning from a team that lost in the 9th Region semifinals last March and posted a 26-6 record.
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