Finding his destination in the hockey world
Carbery didn’t play in NHL, but as a coach, he belongs
WASHINGTON — The Victoria Racquet Club was born in the late 1800s in British Columbia’s capital city to house tennis and badminton matches and eventually evolved to include ice sports. For decades, the club has been known for producing elite figure skaters and professional hockey players.
It’s also where Spencer Carbery began showing glimpses of his future in coaching nearly 25 years ago. He was just 16 when he joined an older team at the club. Carbery was the youngest player but fierce and relentless on the ice. He earned a reputation for being a thoughtful, cerebral and inquisitive student of the game, often probing his coaches about their strategies and speaking up to provide a plan of attack before faceoffs and during timeouts.
“I referred to him a lot, and he always had the respect of his older teammates,” said Craig Didmon, one of Carbery’s youth coaches at the racquet club that year. “When he walked in the room, you could see and you knew and you could feel that he wanted to win even more than I did.”
Some of that same energy was present as Carbery walked into Capital One Arena to be introduced as the 20th head coach of the Washington Capitals on June 1. By the end of the afternoon, he had admitted he was “not a huge reflect back, think about things” kind of guy — but back home in Victoria, those who know him best were already celebrating his improbable rise.
“He said it a long time ago, that he wanted to do this and get into coaching in the NHL,” Didmon said. “Usually what he says comes true.”
Carbery’s playing days were dotted with rejection; he was cut from teams in juniors and bounced around the continent throughout his college and professional career. Although he never played in the NHL, he found another way to reach the pinnacle of the sport. Some of those closest to Carbery describe the 41-year-old as a maniacal competitor who still carries the gumption
Capitals coach Spencer Carbery smiles during his introductory news conference on June 1 in Washington.
he did all those years ago as a teenager at the racquet club — but also as a leader who has shown both the humility to develop in the face of success and restraint from developing grudges against those who may have counted him out along the way.
“One thing about Spencer Carbery, he’s never burned a bridge in his life,” said Carbery’s father, Bryan. “And there were lots of opportunities for him to burn a bridge. Spencer never forgets anybody.”
Bryan has held on to a college essay his son wrote nearly two decades ago, often looking at it to retrace his path through the sport. Carbery wrote about how he relished waking up at 4:30 a.m. every day to head to the rink with his father, who would sit in the stands with a cup of coffee and watch his son skate. Bryan would buy Carbery an orange juice on the way home after practice. The essay also included all of the challenges Carbery went through early in his career. “He hit so many brick walls along the way. … It didn’t shake him,” Bryan said.
One of those brick walls came in 1999, when Carbery tried out for Junior A teams and didn’t make one. He opted to play for a
local Junior B team, the Peninsula Panthers. Carbery was three minutes late to the first practice. His coach, Pete Zubersky, told him to hit the showers.
“There’s no use to being late twice in one day,” he told Carbery, who stormed off the ice. Zubersky knew he had lit a fire. Carbery was not a great skater. He did not have the best skill. He was known for wearing paper-thin throwback shoulder pads — “What they were wearing in the NHL from 1945,” Zubersky said — and for his intensity.
“Probably the most competitive guy to ever come through our program,” Zubersky said.
That year was a turning point, as was 2008, when Carbery’s minor league team, the Fresno Falcons, went broke and folded three days before Christmas. Carbery was suddenly a free agent and needed a job. Desperate to remain in the sport, he worked a connection and moved across the country to begin playing for the South Carolina Stingrays in the ECHL.
Within two years, the team hired Carbery as an assistant coach. He made roughly $100 per game and ran camps in the summer to make ends meet. It turned out to be a big break. Carbery eventually became coach of the Stingrays, the Capitals’ ECHL affiliate at the time. Carbery remained in the role for five years. He continued to work his way through Washington’s farm system when he was hired as the coach of the organization’s American Hockey League affiliate in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Yet even after establishing himself as a rising star, there was no spot for him with the Capitals’ coaching staff after the 2020-21 season. Carbery, recognizing he still needed seasoning, bet on himself and left the comfort of the Capitals’ system to work as an assistant with the Toronto Maple Leafs, with whom he earned the respect of a star-studded dressing room and engineered a historic turnaround for the power-play unit.
“I never played in the National Hockey League,” Carbery said. “I thought it was a tremendous opportunity to be a part of an Original Six franchise, coach a power play, a team that was right there trying to push to make the next step.”
During his first season in Toronto, Carbery received a call from Zubersky. A Peninsula Panthers player had broken one of Carbery’s scoring records. Zubersky asked Carbery if he could call the kid to congratulate him before a weeknight practice, even though he knew it would be approaching midnight in Toronto. When Carbery made time to do it, the entire dressing room back on Vancouver Island erupted in cheers.
“He’s a kid who never forgets where he comes from,” Zubersky said.
As the Capitals tendered their offer to Carbery this past week, he had to make another call. He phoned his father, who was traveling in Munich. Bryan had enjoyed his own athletic success over the years, serving as a longtime golf coach at the University of Victoria. But this was as much his dream for his son to become an NHL head coach as it was Carbery’s.
So when Carbery began the conversation by asking his father about his vacation, Bryan had to interrupt him.
“Tell me what’s going on with hockey,” he said.
Spencer responded that he would be the next coach of the Washington Capitals before telling his father three simple words: “I belong here.”