Govs assistant coach Jake Peterson has gone full circle en route to his place back in the dugout as an assistant coach at Austin Peay. The Lakewood, Colo. native, who played two years for the Govs, graduated in 2005 and recently completed work on his master’s degree. He began his initial post-graduate year as a graduate assistant for men’s basketball in the fall and baseball in the spring of the 2005-06 season.
The highly-touted middle infielder was a member of two Austin Peay championship teams – earning a regular-season title as a junior and an O’Reilly/Ohio Valley Conference Tournament title as a senior. In two years, he started all but one game, hit .319 with 22 doubles, 59 RBI and struck out only 43 times – that’s once every 9.3 at-bats.
Transferring from Independence Community College in Independence, Kan., Peterson came to Austin Peay in 2004. As a junior transfer, he started all 55 games at second base and batted second in the lineup. He hit .310, piecing together nine hit streaks of three games while reaching base safely in a team-high 18 consecutive games. In the field, he posted a .975 fielding percentage with six errors in 236 chances.
In his senior season, Peterson was even better. He hit .328 and was the toughest Gov to strikeout, going down on strikes once every 15.36 plate appearances. Midway through the season, he tabbed a 20-game hit-streak, where he hit .466 with 11 multi-hit games. At the time, the streak was the Govs longest since the 2000 season.
He was named second-team All-OVC after hitting .386 in conference play with a .453 on-base percentage. Peterson and the Govs won the O’Reilly/OVC Tournament and made Austin Peay’s second-ever NCAA Regional Tournament appearance.
At Independence, Peterson hit .390 with nine home runs and a team-best 54 RBI in his sophomore season. He was named to the 2003 Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference first-team and was the Eastern Division Most Valuable Player. In addition, he was named to the NJCAA Division I All-Region VI Baseball first-team.
Jake recently married the former Nikki Loos.
