General passers-by on Wednesday could be excused for being confused by the Washington Capitals flag flying alongside that of the Vancouver Canucks outside Christie’s Carriage House. The Canucks affiliation in this province is obvious but the Caps are not widely followed here with one caveat — head coach Spencer Carbery’s family and friends.
“There are not a lot of Capitals fans here outside of this pub — we couldn’t find many Capitals hats in sporting goods stores around town,” quipped uncle Brock Carbery, owner of Christie’s Carriage House, which has become the go-to Caps watching hub for the Carbery clan.
“We are so proud of him. What he has done in Washington has been just fantastic.”
After leading the Capitals to the playoffs in his first NHL stint last season, Carbery has guided Washington to the third-best winning percentage in the NHL this season heading into Wednesday’s game in the U.S. capital against the Canucks. His family knows the secret to his success because they know the man, and have since he was a kid skating in the Saanich Minor Hockey Association and then Racquet Club of Victoria.
“Spencer is so good with people,” said Brock Carbery.
“It’s that simple. His players absolutely love him. He has the total respect of his players.”
Carbery says he absorbed a lot from his Island hockey coaches, including Jack Hagen and Craig Didmon at the Racquet Club, Pete Zubersky with the Peninsula Panthers of the Vancouver Island Junior Hockey League and Greg Adams with the Cowichan Valley Capitals in the sa国际传媒 Hockey League: “They all helped mold my hockey mind.”
But his greatest coaching influence was dad Bryan Carbery, retired head coach of the University of Victoria golf team who guided the Vikes to four Royal Canadian Golf Association university titles in his 13 years. It was more by osmosis than verbally handed-down knowledge.
“I never butted in much with sage pieces of advice or anything like that,” said Bryan Carbery, as he prepared to watch Wednesday’s game.
“Spencer saw what I had to do, all the travel and the preparation, and it just became a part of him and he quietly took it all in — about what it takes to be a coach. It’s been cool watching him because he just lets his guys do their jobs. He’s got a great dressing room because he’s so positive.”
What’s amazing about the younger Carbery’s rise is that he was preparing for a career in the financial field following his minor-pro ECHL playing career when he took up an offer to help on the South Carolina Stingrays bench and just sort of fell into coaching. Carbery steadily worked his way up the minor-pro head-coaching ladder, mentoring the Stingrays to winning ways from 2011 to 2016 with a 207-115-39 overall record and to Game 7 of the 2015 ECHL Kelly Cup final. He became head coach of the Saginaw Spirit of the major-junior OHL in 2016-17 and was assistant coach with Team sa国际传媒 Black for the 2017 World U-17 Hockey Challenge. Carbery became assistant coach in the AHL with the Providence Bruins and was named head coach of Hershey in 2018, leading the historic Bears franchise to a three-season record of 104-50-17 and was named AHL coach of the year in 2020-21.
“You learn to grind it out [in the minor pros]. And if you treat people the right way, you can succeed in this business,” he told the sa国际传媒.
That led to the NHL and a Toronto Maple Leafs assistant-coaching tenure before becoming bench boss in Washington last season.
Carbery returns to his hometown every summer to golf in the annual Hugh Carbery memorial tournament at Uplands, in honour of his late grandfather and which raises money for Victoria Hospice, with the 50th anniversary of the tournament coming up in August. With the Capitals where they are, who knows, he may be bringing a certain Cup along with him this year.
“We have to be careful with that, resting on what we accomplished at the beginning of the year,” Carbery said, in a media scrum this week.
“That’s what our challenge is before the Four Nations Break.”
