How a stint in the Lowcountry prepared Spencer Carbery to be the Washington Capitals’ coach
“Guys, tonight is our last game,” Thomas told his stunned audience.
The Falcons won that night, and then Carbery went home to talk to his then-fiancée, Casey, and figure out their next steps.
At 27, after bouncing around the lower rungs of pro hockey for two-plus years, Carbery figured Fresno’s collapse was a sign. The couple decided to move to South Carolina, where Carbery’s mother lived. He planned to get a job in finance, using the business administration degree he earned at St. Norbert College (Wis.).
Teams across the ECHL reached out to Carbery as the news spread, but he thanked each caller for the interest and told them he was ready to move on.
At first, Carbery gave Bednar — who was the coach of the South Carolina Stingrays, the Washington Capitals’ ECHL affiliate — the same message he told the other teams. But Bednar, now the coach of the Colorado Avalanche, didn’t back down.
“You’re already coming out this way,” Bednar said to Carbery. “Why don’t you give it a try with the Stingrays, just for a couple of weeks?”
Carbery agreed to see how things went. The only catch was that Bednar needed him to meet up with the Stingrays in 48 hours — 2,600 miles across the country. The couple hopped in Casey’s Chrysler Sebring and hit the road.
“We got in on a Tuesday night,” Carbery said. “I went on the ice with Bedsy and his son Kruz, just got a skate because I hadn’t skated in a week. He was like, ‘You’ll play tomorrow.’ And then the rest was history.”
Carbery quickly became a key piece of the Stingrays’ lineup. His leadership qualities were evident from the beginning, and he made an instant impact as a player always willing to stand up for his teammates. Six months after Carbery’s abrupt arrival in South Carolina, the Stingrays lifted the Kelly Cup as ECHL champions.
And his rise continued. Carbery became the Stingrays’ assistant coach a year later. A year after that, he was the head coach. And 12 years after that, with a handful of other stops in between, Carbery, now 41, was named coach of the Capitals.
Carbery is tasked with walking a tightrope in Washington, which opens its season Friday against the Pittsburgh Penguins. He must help an aging roster contend for the Stanley Cup playoffs while developing the young talent that will one day be the core of the team. It’s a big job to hand to a first-year coach, but it’s one for which the Capitals believe Carbery is ready.
“There’s a high level of trust and comfort for both parties,” Washington General Manager Brian MacLellan said at Carbery’s introduction earlier this year. “We have a number of people that have relationships with Spencer throughout the organization. … We feel very fortunate that we feel we’ve signed one of the best young coaches in the game.”
‘I just fell in love with coaching’
Carbery never envisioned himself as a coach. When his playing career wound down, his plan was to get a job in finance or banking and leave hockey behind.
After coaching the Stingrays to the Kelly Cup in 2009, Bednar moved on to be an assistant coach in the AHL. Cail MacLean, who had been Bednar’s assistant and is now an assistant coach for the Calgary Flames, was promoted to the head job and coached Carbery for what turned out to be his final season as a player.
Carbery wanted to continue his career for at least one more season, but MacLean had a different plan for the veteran forward.
“Toward the end of the summer, I was obviously communicating with Cail, who was the head coach and [general manager] at the time, to let him know that I wanted to play another year,” Carbery said. “And he said, ‘Well, Carbs, what do you think about being our assistant coach?’ And I said, ‘You know, Cail, I’d really like to play another year.’ ”
MacLean’s response? “I’m not asking you to play.”
More than a decade later, MacLean wants to be clear that Carbery wasn’t the kind of player who hung on for too long and needed someone to tell him it was over. But MacLean knew the opportunity might not be available again if Carbery didn’t take it when he had the chance.
“That was the message I was trying to send,” MacLean said. “Like, you can play, but if this opportunity passes by — I did this same thing two years ago, and now I’m the head coach.”
The job wasn’t glamorous. The part-time gig paid Carbery less for the season than he would have made in a month working in finance, but he decided he wanted to make it work. Much like his decision to accept Bednar’s pitch some 18 months earlier, the decision to jump into coaching with the Stingrays was transformational for Carbery.
“Right away, I just fell in love with coaching,” Carbery said. “Enjoyed the grind. Loved the individual development, the pre-scout, everything, right from that first year as an assistant coach. Just fell in love with the role and the profession.”
A year later, MacLean moved on to an AHL assistant job, and the head coaching job in South Carolina was Carbery’s. At 29, Carbery was suddenly at the helm of an ECHL team, which meant he was also the director of hockey operations and the general manager. Every detail of the organization, from roster acquisitions to cleaning out the players’ apartments after the season, fell under his purview.
“As an organization, it’s very important for us to give people an opportunity if they work hard and are doing a good job,” said Rob Concannon, the president of the Stingrays. “We like to reward them. We like to give them an opportunity. We’ve all been given opportunities in our lives. Probably all of us have been given those opportunities when we weren’t 100 percent ready.
“But with Spencer, it was a no-brainer.”
The Stingrays made the playoffs each year under Carbery, and each successive season, they won more games than they had the previous one. Carbery was named the ECHL coach of the year after the 2013-14 season, and in the 2014-15 season, Carbery’s fourth year, South Carolina won 23 games in a row — a streak that remains the longest in ECHL history.
“He’s a detailed person,” Concannon said. “He’s passionate. He’s fair, direct and honest, and I think as he evolved as a coach, you saw those attributes come into play more and more throughout the years.”
Ryan Warsofsky, whom Carbery hired as an assistant in 2013, recalled arriving at the rink as early as 6 a.m., trying to make a good impression, and finding Carbery, who often arrived around 4, already eating his second breakfast.
“I tell him to this day, out of all the jobs and interviews I’ve done, that was probably the most in-depth interview — for the ECHL assistant coaching position,” said Warsofsky, now an assistant coach with the San Jose Sharks.
Carbery is somewhat self-conscious about his work habits, sensitive to the knowledge that it could put undue pressure on his staff to match the early-morning hours he tends to keep — or make it seem like he wants acclaim for working more than anyone else. He wouldn’t mind, actually, being able to get a little bit more sleep.
“I’m not a great sleeper, and when I have things to do, it’s hard for me to shut it off,” Carbery said. “As opposed to, like, sitting and lying there, my mechanism is that I just get up and start to get to work. … It’s not about, ‘Hey, I’m working the most or trying to be here the longest.’ ”
In those early morning hours, Carbery gets to do what might be his favorite part of coaching: go through video and prepare for the day’s meetings.
“When you left that room, whether you were in an individual meeting or a team meeting, you knew exactly what the message was,” Warsofsky said. “Whether you were a hockey player or you were a guy working a construction job, you probably knew what the message was because he was so clear and concise on what he wanted to communicate to the players and the team.”
Carbery is a staunch believer that any player, regardless of age, can develop their game and get better. He’s an active teacher on the ice, often pulling players aside during practice or staying on the ice afterward for conversations, but video is his main teaching tool — particularly with younger players.
“You can tell he’s super enthusiastic about what he’s doing,” Capitals forward Matthew Phillips said. “He’s very prepared. He’s very calculated. What I like as a player is you understand why he’s preaching certain things and he gives you the process of where we’re going with it. He makes it pretty easy and puts the responsibility on the players to go out and do it because he prepares us well.”
‘I just wanted to survive’
While Carbery was honing those skills in South Carolina, he never envisioned one day applying them in the NHL.
His stepwise path through coaching — from South Carolina, he became an Ontario Hockey League head coach, then an AHL assistant coach, then an AHL head coach, then an NHL assistant coach before being hired by Washington — paints the picture of a long-held plan. But it wasn’t until “four or five” years ago, when Carbery was coaching the Capitals’ AHL affiliate in Hershey, Pa., that he knew he wanted to become an NHL head coach.
“A lot of people ask or would say like, ‘Did you always, even starting in the ECHL, want to be an NHL head coach?’ ” Carbery said. “I’m like, NHL head coach? I just wanted to survive and get another year and be able to coach the Stingrays for another year. NHL head coach? Like, what? It wasn’t even on the radar.”
Carbery was named the AHL’s coach of the year in 2021. After that, he left the Hershey Bears to spend two years as an assistant coach with the Toronto Maple Leafs before he stepped up to the NHL with the Capitals.
Carbery has remained close with his onetime colleagues from the Stingrays; he and Warsofsky talk “every day,” Warsofsky said. Even seven years after leaving the Stingrays, Carbery’s connection to Charleston — the city where he fell in love with coaching and his children were born — remains an indelible part of who he is.
And it all started with a phone call from Bednar and a race across the country.
“It’s just crazy,” Carbery said. “I feel like everybody can think about this in their lives and the different moments where things could go left or right and then happenstance. … It was just a really, really good fit for me.”
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