CAREY MADE MANUAL, EAST INTO WINNERS
From Manual to East, Rudy Carey closes in on all-time CHSAA wins record
EDITOR’S NOTE: Third in a series about basketball icons in Colorado. The first two installments profiled Alex English and Mahmoud Abdul-rauf.
He was an all-state point guard at Denver East, then all-wac at Colorado State.
But it wasn’t until 1975 — when Rudy Carey was invited to Nuggets training camp, and later cut — that the 67-year-old Colorado prep hoops icon first seriously thought about coaching.
“I never really knew if that was something I wanted to make a career out of,” said Carey, who has nine state titles to his name. “I was working and continuing to play (after college), but evidently I wasn’t good enough for the Nuggets. After I was cut, I wanted to stay in basketball in some form, so I decided to go into coaching.” Good call, coach.
Carey began his career as a graduate assistant at Western State, then was an assistant coach for two seasons at George Washington. His first head coaching stop came at Manual in 1979, where he won three titles before moving over to his alma mater in 1992. Six more titles with the Angels, and 17 Denver Prep League titles overall, has pushed Carey’s record to 837-213, second all-time in CHSAA history.
As DPL historian Dick Nelson puts it, Carey “put DPS basketball back on the map when he started winning over at Manual. And then when he got to East, which had also been down, things changed overnight there, too.”
Carey built his two powerhouses with blunt leadership as a self-described “proud man” whom former allstate guard Daylen Kountz said “always tells you exactly what he’s thinking, and he never sugarcoats anything.”
“He’d be hard on us in practice, he’d challenge us, he’d tell us the straightforward, ugly truth,” said Kountz, now at Northern Colorado. “If you weren’t playing good that day, you would hear about it. But that
kept the expectations high for individuals and the program.”
Carey’s son and longtime assistant, David Carey, describes his dad as a “players’ coach” whose relationships with his players and their families was a driving force in the rise of both Manual and Denver East.
“Players gravitated toward him,” Nelson said. “If you’re a talented kid playing basketball, you want to go where you know you have a chance to go to state and be in the mix every season. For a long time, that was almost (exclusively) with Rudy.”
Across 42 years at Manual and Denver East, Carey has coached six Mr. Colorado Basketball selections (including Dominique Collier, who won the award twice), 25 first-team All-colorado players and 33 Division I players — three marks which are all-time bests among the state’s boys basketball coaches.
And while some naysayers chalk Carey’s success up to the pure talent of his players comparative to the rest of the field, longtime Thunderridge coach Joe Ortiz said that’s not the case. Ortiz and Carey have coached against each other about 20 times, including in three state title games, of which Carey’s Angels won two.
“Rudy does a great job strategically,” Ortiz said. “The second time we played them in the state finals in 2004 after we beat them the year before, they pressed us to start the game, they jumped on us and got us down. They controlled the game the whole time. Just one example of why he’s underrated (in Xs and Os).”
Speaking of naysayers, like with just about any prep dynasty, there have long been accusations of Carey recruiting standouts. And there is no question Denver East has benefited from a bevy of transfers and out-of-neighborhood kids over the years, starting with Carey’s first season on City Park Esplanade, when his son, David, and several other Manual starters transferred to Denver East along with their coach.
But Carey said the school, and the program, recruits itself.
“East is such an attractive DPS school academically and socially, that I didn’t have to recruit — kids were coming anyway,” Carey said. “(Critics) act like I’m the author of that, but I know in 1960 when (coach) Bill Weimer went to George Washington, he took the whole starting five from East and they went over and won a state championship at G.W. (in 1961). But people want to act like Rudy Carey was the author of recruiting.”
Even with the rise of suburban powerhouse programs such as Thunderridge since the turn of the century, Denver East remains a talent pipeline that major college coaches always make sure to check in with each winter. In that vein, players who don an Angels uniform walk the walk of a feared, storied prep program.
“Rudy instills a great amount of confidence in his team, so they have quite a bit of swagger,” Ortiz said. “They know they’re the program; they feel they are the team to beat. And they play like that, and that comes from his leadership … Plus back in the day, Denver Prep only played league games, so you never really got to experience them until the tournament, and I would say there was kind of an aura, or an intimidation factor, about them.”
That “intimidation factor” no doubt starts with Carey, who is well known for his on-court intensity. As the coach himself sees it, “people say I’m animated, but I call it passion for the game.” That passion adds to Denver East’s mystique.
“He makes it uncomfortable,” Ortiz said. “He makes the officials uncomfortable, opponents uncomfortable, he makes everybody uncomfortable. You’ve got to be mentally tough to beat him.”
Carey’s own toughness was forged in his childhood neighborhood just north of City Park, where he grew up at 35th Avenue and Fillmore Street. The son of two longtime DPS workers, Carey said he “saw lots of my buddies go to the penitentiary, a lot of them killed.” But strict boundaries set by his parents, and an intensely channeled love for the game, enabled him to rise above obstacles as a youth.
Fast forward several decades, and that Denverite is right alongside the state’s widely-proclaimed all-time best player, Chauncey Billups, as “certainly the two biggest Colorado basketball icons” in J.B. Bickerstaff’s mind.
“It’s Rudy, and it’s Chauncey Billups,” said Bickerstaff, who won a state title under Carey as a senior in 1996 and is now the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. “You talk about impact, about name recognition and overall resume. … Those guys are in their own category.”
But will the icon hang around long enough to break the all-time wins mark? Carey stands 39 shy of Dick Katte’s 876 victories, accomplished from 1964 to 2012 at Denver Christian. Considering the Angels have averaged about 20 wins a year as of late, the record could be broken as early as 2022.
“He still has the mental capacity, the passion, the energy, the ability to motivate the kids,” David Carey said. “So he’s going to be around for a while longer, and that’s the best that I can put it.”