By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Mike Carey is a macho guy coaching a macho game in a macho way in a women’s world.
And he’s doing quite fine, thank you.
That he is winning doesn’t surprise anyone. He’s been a winner.
That’s he still coaching the West Virginia women’s team is a surprise to a whole lot of people who knew him well.
“Some of my buddies who knew me in the profession told me I’d never make it on the women’s side because of my demeanor and coaching style,” he said.
He didn’t argue with them.
In a changing world, Mike Carey is a throwback in a lot of ways.
His language can be salty. His approach is straight forward. He’ll yell and stomp his foot, point and snarl.
And then he’ll get mad.
Think around to just the events of the past few weeks.
• Football coach Jim Leavitt fired at South Florida after being charged with getting physical with a player.
• Football coach Mike Leach fired at Texas Tech for allegedly punishing receiver Adam James for not playing through a concussion.
• Football coach Mark Mangino fired at Kansas for his treatment of players.
You can go back further, of course, to Bobby Knight, who lost his job at Indiana for being physical with a player. Here was Carey, far closer to Bobby Knight than to Gladys Knight, coming over from coaching in the obscurity of Division II to a national program on the Division I level.
And coaching women.
How did this happen, and how did Carey turn the rag-tag program he inherited from Alexis Basil, a program that had won 11 and lost 44 in the previous two years before his rival, a program that had lost to Connecticut, 100-28, in 2001 in a game played at Morgantown High, into the nation’s No. 11 team?
Making a change
Carey was huge at Salem. His last five years of 13 years there as coach and athletic director produced four 28-win season and one 26.
His teams were ranked as high as No. 1 in Division II, he reached the Elite Eight and the Final Four.
He had done all he could do. It was time to move on.
“It was just the timing of everything,” he said. “The president of the school was getting ready to retire. Financially, Salem was not always sound.”
WVU had fired Basil. There was an opening for him, just down the road, a Division I opening.
But it was coaching women.
“I knew Ed Pastilong, not well, but I knew him. Rich Rodriguez was here and I knew him well. I’d had a lot of conversations with Coach (Garrett) Ford. We’d taken a lot of transfers from West Virginia,” Carey explained. I wanted to make a move and I didn’t want to move out of state.”
And so he went after the West Virginia women’s basketball job.
“My wife asked why I would want to do that. I told her it was an opportunity to get into Division I, even though it was on the women’s side,” he said.
In the greatest case of casting since Walter Matthau became manager of the Bad News Bears, Mike Carey became the women’s coach at West Virginia.
Carey’s son, Chris, approached him.
“I always thought I’d play for you,” he said.
At that point, his daughter, Chelby, interrupted.
“Well, now I can play for you,” she said.
“It was 50-50,” Carey said. “The two girls thought it was great, the two boys weren’t so sure. They were young enough where they understood, but they didn’t understand, if you know what I mean. The time had come for me to ask myself if I wanted to coach at Division I.
“I’d done all I could at Salem. I don’t know what else I could have done.”
Luckily, Carey said he didn’t know much about the women’s program at West Virginia. If he had known where it stood, he might have reconsidered.
“I did some research and knew I was ready for another challenge,” Carey said.
The biggest challenge
Some challenge. They had less of challenge trying to put Humpty-Dumpty together.
And Carey was going to do the walking on eggshells, so to speak.
“I knew from the git-go I couldn’t be as vocal and my demeanor could not be the same with the women as it was with the men,” he said. “It was a big challenge for me. It motivated me. It excited me.”
The x’s and o’s were not a problem.
“I just found on the women’s side you have to coach below the rim. On the men’s side, you coach some above the rim,” he said. “The only other thing I found was if you ran a quick hitter and it broke down the guys knew what to do from playing on the playground and things like that. With the women, you’d better have option 2, 3, 4 and 5 if a play broke down.”
Carey also didn’t understand the physical requirements.
“I didn’t realize the physical strength you needed on the women’s side. In the beginning they were lifting and I was thinking, ‘That’s fine, but I really don’t care.’ I found out here in the Big East, we had to get a lot stronger. The physical player was a big surprise to me.”
And there were others.
“I remember a reporter calling that first year and asking how it was going and I told him fine, but my biggest problem is learning how to work these phones. Well, he wrote the next day that he hoped I could learn to read a defense better than I worked the phones. I read that and laughed.”
Here to stay
The first year Carey went 14-14, which was a huge improvement.
“I think it was a smooth transition,” he said. “I still had my personality, I still had my style of coaching and I still have my intensity.
“But have I toned it down? I have. I don’t know if it’s because I’m coaching women or because I’m getting older. The older I got, even at Salem, I calmed down a little more because I matured more.”
Carey maintains it was as much of an adjustment going to the D-I level than going from coaching men to women.
“At the D-2 level, there’s no way you do the national recruiting you do at D-I. At D-II there were schools that had money to go out and recruit and schools that didn’t. Here, everyone has the money to go out. The recruiting is intense.”
This is not a complaint.
“I like it a lot better,” he said. “The better talent we get, the better I like it.”
And in a way, he’s hooked.
“Have I bought into it? Absolutely. I have 100 percent bought into women’s basketball, into West Virginia University, into this program,” he said.
He understands that he is now a women’s coach and that you don’t often see coaches move from the women back to the men’s game.
He’s content with that, but he understands that there is no equality despite the laws of the land when it comes to women’s basketball. The No. 1 problem is there are enough top-line players to go around.
“It’s gotten better the last nine years, but is it like the men’s side? No,” he said.
Connecticut, Tennessee, Notre Dame and a few others dominate. Is UConn’s domination good for the game of women’s basketball?
“It gives you something to aim for. There are four or five schools out there who get the best talent in the country and there’s just not enough talent out there on the women’s side to trickle down like it does on the men’s side.
“Hopefully, in the future, that will start doing that, but it’s not like that right now.”
There really isn’t equality within athletic departments, either, between the men’s and women’s games, although Carey doesn’t complain about that either.
“Until you have been on the women’s side … or been a woman, or a male coaching a women’s sport, you don’t realize how much there is out there like that,” he said. “Sometimes you’re looked on like a second-class citizen. I’m not saying our school does that, but it exists. It took me a while to adjust to that.
“With my personality, I believe our sport is just as important as any sport. I have to feel that way.”
He says every once in while his women would come to him ask why the men got something they didn’t, but that has lessened the last three or four years.
And it’s fine with him if they do.
“This is my opinion. Men’s basketball and football make the money for all the other sports. I knew that when I came here. I never was one to go down and say we have to have what they have,” Carey said. “I measure the program against Big East women’s teams. I want to be comparable in salaries, in budgets and expenses. I don’t worry about the men. I worry about what I compete against.”
And right now he has them competing on equal footing with all but Connecticut, but even that may be coming. He’s found his niche.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
