Basketball
REGIONAL CHAMPIONS
1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1992, 2004, 2006, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020
STATE SEMI-FINALIST
2004, 2015
STATE RUNNER UP
1967
STATE CHAMPIONS
2014, 2018
The CCH basketball team competes at the Varsity, JV, and Freshman levels. Students are welcome to attend open gym sessions from April to October. Tryouts for all three teams are held in October, with 12-15 players chosen for the freshman team and 20 chosen for the JV/Varsity roster. Cuts are necessary to limit the rosters to those numbers. The teams typically play 20-30 games beginning in December and running through post-season play in March. Practices are held daily, after school on days when there are no games scheduled.
Varsity Head Coach: Jake Thelen
Coach Jake Thelen is entering his first year as the Head Coach of the basketball program in 2024-2025.
Coach Thelen is native of Edgewood, Kentucky and starred at Covington Catholic – where he was selected to play in both the Kentucky/Indiana and the Kentucky/Ohio All-Star games – before embarking on an All-American career at Bellarmine University and gaining coaching experience at three top Division I basketball programs.
Thelen, Class of 2011, finished his career at Covington Catholic with a scoring average of 16.6 points per game and is the 8th all-time leading scorer in CCH basketball history with 1,258 points. He also holds the CCH single game record with 18 field goals.
Thelen most recently served as Director of Player Development/Assistant Coach for the University of Cincinnati men’s basketball team. Prior to joining UC, Thelen was the director of basketball operations at the University of Georgia – the youngest director of basketball operations at a Power 5 school when he arrived in Athens at age 25. Thelen’s on-campus coordination 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 and one of six top-100 prospects Georgia has signed during Thelen’s tenure in Athens.
Thelen was an All-American forward at Bellarmine University, where he finished ranked No. 16 among Bellarmine’s career scoring leaders with 1,412 points in three seasons. As a senior, he posted the second-highest point (651) and rebound (375) tallies in school history to average a double-double of 18.6 ppg and 10.7 rebounds per game. Thelen was a consensus All-American and was named the GLVC Player of the Year in 2015. Thelen was tabbed first-team All-America by Basketball Times, DII Bulletin, the National Association of Basketball Coaches and BennettRank.com.