Former QU coach Hellenthal relishes NCAA Tournament berth at SIU-E

QUINCY (WGEM) - With about a minute left in the Ohio Valley Conference Tournament championship game, Ryan Hellenthal could finally take a deep breath.

The Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville assistant coach and the second-seeded Cougars were in route to a 69-48 victory over top-seeded Southeast Missouri and earn the league’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

“I was looking over at the other coaches and one is Mike Waldo, just a legend at Edwardsville High School who has won more than 700 games,” said Hellenthal, an assistant coach for one year and head coach for four years at Quincy University from 2017-22.

“And with a big smile he says, ‘Coach can you believe we are going to the NCAA Tournament?’ It was just an awesome moment.”

Eight days later, nearly 2,000 people packed into First Community Arena on Sunday to celebrate the Cougars during an NCAA Tournament Selection Show Watch Party.

The arena broke into a thunderous delirium when “SIU-Edwardsville” was shown on the top line of the Midwest Regional and a live shot from the arena was shown on national TV.

That’s when the 16th-seeded Cougars (22-11) learned they will be matched against another team of Cougars -- the top-seeded and second-ranked Houston Cougars (30-4) at 1 p.m. Thursday in Wichita, Kan.

“Just look at all these fans here,” Hellenthal said while looking around the arena filled with toddlers to longtime alumni in their 80s.

“The campus and community support here has been unwavering. It’s been a long journey and just a great tip of the cap to the people who have been here.

“And now we have a moment on the national stage.”

In order to get to the national tournament, SIU-E had to get past SEMO, which had beaten them twice during the regular season. That victory gave the Cougars their first NCAA Tournament appearance since going to Division I in 2008.

“We really had to battle to overcome a lot of adversity,” Hellenthal said. “We knew this time we had to be the tougher team, the more physical team. We had to flip the script.”

After the game in a great bit of theater, head coach Brian Barone took out his own pair of scissors to cut down the nets.

“I’m about to go get a pair of scissors that I hung up six years ago above our locker room door. We did that six years ago. People didn’t think we were going to be able to do it,” Barone said on his postgame interview with ESPN prior to the net-cutting ceremony.

“Those scissors have hung at the top of our locker room door since our first team meeting,” Hellenthal said.

Barone, who has worked with Hellenthal before and hired him in June 2022, took over an SIUE program in 2019-20 that had suffered 11 straight losing seasons since joining Division I in 2008-09. None of those first 11 teams had won more than 12 games in a season and eight of those teams hit 20 losses.

One of Barone’s first moves was placing the scissors above the locker room door to show the program what he believed they could achieve. Barone’s Cougars struggled through the first three seasons, going a combined 28-61.

Collinsville product Ray’Sean Taylor, the OVC Player of the Year, was at the forefront of the SIUE turnaround under Barone. The team went 19-14 in 2022-23 for its first winning season in the DI era and then 17-16 in 2023-24. The Cougars went 20-11 in the 2024-25 regular season and finished second in the OVC to earn the double-bye a spot in the tournament’s semifinals.

Taylor, the program’s all-time leading scorer at the D1 level with 1,952 points, has been at SIU-E for five years and has suffered two major knee injuries.

But like the Cougars, he keeps on pushing.

“It’s really unbelievable,” Hellenthal said. “Ray’Sean means so much to the 618 (Collinsville and Edwardsville area codes),” Hellenthal said. “Despite the injuries he never flinched and propelled us. He helped elevate the program.”

Now, the SIU-E coaching staff, which also includes another former QU assistant Jay Bradley, is working around the clock to prepare for Houston.

“It’s just been an unbelievable experience,” Hellenthal said.

And it’s not over.