MORGANTOWN, W.VA. - The victories are beginning to add up for West Virginia University women’s basketball coach Mike Carey.

 

He got win No. 300 at WVU on Tuesday night against Grand Canyon in Spokane, Washington, and he’s now two victories away from surpassing Kittie Blakemore for the most in school history.

 

Also on the horizon is career win No. 600, which should happen sometime later this year.

 

“You just don’t get 600 wins by coincidence,” West Virginia assistant coach Lester Rowe said. “And it didn’t happen overnight.”

 

No it didn’t, and while all of those wins are certainly eye catching, even more impressive is how he’s done it – from mopping floors and driving vans as the men’s basketball coach/athletic director/dean of students at Division II Salem College to his mid-career transition to Division I women’s college basketball in his early 40s.

 

Yes, this guy has earned every single one of them.

 

Carey still wears a jacket and tie to games, but you get the sense that he would be much more comfortable in a pullover and a loose pair of slacks. The sport coat is always off during pregame warmups, the tie is usually loosened before the ball goes into the air and the shirt often gets dislodged from his pants, how much so depending upon how mad he gets during games.

 

It’s almost as if he chooses to wear them just to make himself miserable enough to coach the way he believes he needs to coach to be successful.

 

“I like things that (make him mad),” Carey laughed, phrasing it slightly differently. “Sometimes I will invent things. I like to stir things up just to keep me going. I’ve always believed players react to their coaches, so if I come with energy every day you better bring it, too.”

 

There are two mortal sins in Mike Carey’s life manual – bad attitudes and a lack of effort.

 

Possessing one of those traits gets you the death stare, exhibiting both will get you on the next bus out of town.

 

“I tell recruits right off the bat, ‘I am going to coach you hard and this is not for everybody. If you don’t want to be coached hard, if you don’t want to go to class, if you don’t want to have discipline and you don’t want to do things the right way, then this is not the place for you,’” Carey said matter-of-factly.

 

Those who know Mike Carey the best say he’s always been that blunt, from the time he was an eighth-grader terrorizing other eighth-graders on the playgrounds with his brothers and continuing on through high school and into his college days playing at Salem.

 

“Growing up, I thought he was just this monster,” Greg Talkington, veteran high school sports reporter and lifelong Clarksburg resident, said with a laugh. “But once I got to know him, he wasn’t that way at all.”

 

“Hard-nosed, aggressive, knock your head off,” is how Warren Baker, a former WVU player, high school coach and now college basketball analyst for ROOT Sports, describes Carey. “He was that way even playing rec-league softball.”

 

George Rice, Carey’s basketball coach at Liberty High, admits there was a fair amount of finessing that needed to be done to rein him in during his younger days.

 

“It was a continuing challenge,” Rice chuckled.

 

Rice had a facial hair policy for his players that was probably lax for the mid 1970s, but it did require that they have neatly trimmed mustaches and not full, flowing beards. He wanted his guys to look neat and presentable when they were representing their high school and community.

 

Before one game, Carey and another player showed up unshaven as the team was about to leave for a game – more than likely their way of testing their coach’s boundaries.

 

Rice told them if they didn’t shave they weren’t allowed on the bus and couldn’t go to the game, so he placed some shaving cream and two razors on the sink in the locker room and told the rest of the team to get on the bus.

 

Within a matter of minutes, a cleanly shaven Carey and his teammate were able to run down the bus before it got too far down the street.

 

“Mike doesn’t know this, but I discreetly told the bus driver to pull out of the school very slowly,” Rice said. “They had done a quick shave and were able to catch us. I didn’t want to go overboard with it, but how you handle the little things determines how you handle the big things.”

 

Another time, Rice had finished one of his typical four-hour practices a little bit early, so he decided to have an arm-wrestling contest to get a better idea of which players on the team were his true competitors.

 

Rice had a big, strong assistant coach who played college football at Glenville State, so he lined up his players against the burly, young assistant to see which ones were going to hold their own.

 

None of them could except for one – Carey.

 

“It was all he could do to pin him,” Rice said. “And Mike was just a skinny and wiry sophomore at the time. He was just so naturally strong – the thing was, how do you channel that on the court?”

 

Rice figured the best way to do so was by playing Carey near the basket against much bigger players where his natural strength and aggressiveness could be used to his advantage.

 

During Carey’s senior year at Liberty High he led the state in scoring, averaging 33.2 points per game, the vast majority of those coming from 15-feet in or on drives to the basket.

 

“He was so valuable to us inside,” Rice said. “He developed right-handed and left-handed shots. He was good with his back to the basket and he was very good body on body. He could read the other players and he was effective against players much taller even though he was only 6-3.

 

“He didn’t have fantastic jumping ability, but he used body positioning and a lot of the things that I see in his coaching today,” Rice recalled.

 

Carey took that aggressiveness with him to Salem College where he led the West Virginia Conference in scoring in 1978 and finished his career with more than 2,000 points. You don’t score 2,000 career points by being just tough and aggressive, and they don’t come by accident. That's because he could play - and there were outstanding players in the West Virginia Conference at that time as well.

 

“It was good basketball,” Talkington noted. “I think there were probably, overall, higher-caliber players then than you see from those schools today.”

 

Baker, a star player at West Virginia University in the early 1970s, readily agrees.

 

“We used to go down and scrimmage Joe Retton’s Fairmont State teams during the preseason and it took everything we had to beat them. They had guys that should have been at WVU and they had a lot of Division I-caliber athletes that were playing at that level for one reason or another,” Baker said.

 

Aside from Jeff Schneider, who played collegiately at Virginia Tech, and Danny Viglianco, a member of St. Bonaventure’s 1977 NIT team, Carey was among the better basketball players Clarksburg produced during that period of time. Later, Shinnston’s Brett Vincent came along to play at a high level as well.

 

When Carey was at Salem, he went up against West Virginia Tech guard Sedale Threatt, who played 14 years in the NBA, and Fairmont State forward Leroy Loggins, an exceptional small-college player who became a tremendous professional player overseas.

 

Of course, Salem’s Archie Talley is one of the biggest names in West Virginia Conference history, the Washington, D.C., guard frequently scoring 50 points or more in games – and without the benefit of having a three-point line.

 

Later in his career, Talley once scored 116 points in a professional game overseas. It was Mike Carey who followed Talley at Salem and took over his scoring responsibilities there. Carey played on good teams at Salem, but the Tigers could never consistently beat Retton’s powerhouse Fairmont State squads.

 

Nevertheless, when the two rivals met on the hardwood both towns shut down.

 

“Fairmont fans really traveled,” Carey recalled. “Half of our gym would be filled up with Fairmont State fans.”

 

“Those games were a big deal,” recalled former Fairmont Times sports editor Cliff Nichols, who grew up in Fairmont. “You couldn’t get a ticket to the games at the Armory when those two teams played.”

 

***

 

Carey got into the coaching business soon after graduating from Salem, first working with Greg Zimmerman at Flemington High (Zimmerman got his coaching start working for a guy named Charlie Huggins, father of West Virginia coach Bob Huggins) and then moving on to Liberty High to coach the boys and girls before cutbacks in the school system forced him to look for another job in 1988.

 

He ended up at Salem as an assistant coach making barely enough money to pay his bills. A year after that he was Salem’s head coach, most likely through a process of elimination.

 

“They weren’t winning at all when I got there,” Carey recalled. “I was never given anything, especially there. I had to prove myself at Salem that I could coach at that level.”

 

He did.

 

Carey had Salem winning immediately and by the mid-1990s the Tigers had one of the best Division II basketball programs in the country. In his 13 seasons there, Carey’s Salem teams made seven postseason trips, won five WVIAC titles, reached the Elite Eight twice and played in the Final Four in 1997.

 

“When I coached at Salem I think I only had two high school kids my entire career there – most of them were D-I transfers and jucos,” Carey said.

 

“I would recruit D.C., Philly and New York,” he continued. “I would go up and down the East Coast about three times a year and fill my roster up with players that were sitting out or players that didn’t make it (academically). Between the transfers and jucos, that’s how we had to fill our rosters there.”

 

Corky Griffith, Salem’s football coach at the time, didn’t have a home field to call his own so he ingeniously had postcards made of Mountaineer Field that he would send out to recruits. He didn’t specifically tell Salem recruits that they were going to play their home games at Mountaineer Field, but he was just vague enough to lead them to think they might.

 

“I didn’t want to get into too much trouble with the president,” Griffith joked. “A lot of these guys would get off the bus from Cleveland or wherever they were coming from, they would take one look at the place and yell, ‘Hold the damned bus because I ain’t stayin’ here!’

 

Desperate to get players, Griffith once took the remaining money he had in his recruiting budget for the year to purchase an advertisement in the Pittsburgh Press seeking football players to play at Salem College.

 

“My God, we had guys that came to us from mental institutions and also from prisons,” Griffith said. “The USA Today took that ad from the Pittsburgh Press and ran it on the front page of their sports section and we ended up getting inquiries from people all over the world. We ended up having 110 kids playing football for us the next year – and we didn’t even have enough helmets to give out!”

 

Carey didn’t go quite that far to get players, but the challenges he encountered getting players to go to Salem were much the same.

 

Griffith became a regular lunchtime basketball partner of Carey’s, along with a young assistant football coach named Rich Rodriguez. Florida State football coach Jimbo Fisher was part of that lunchtime crowd for a while, too.

 

“Corky was terrible, and he thought he could play,” Carey said. “We used to play two-on-two and Corky would show up in his Chuck Taylor high-top black tennis shoes with no socks on. He would play and mouth off and one time he started limping around and said, ‘Dammit, I think I broke my toe!’ And he did break it! I told him, ‘You’ve got those old tennis shoes without any socks on, what the hell did you expect?’”

 

“We had a lot of fun there but we didn’t have anything,” Griffith said. “If Mike wanted the gym floor cleaned he cleaned it himself. We even did admissions and we got them money through grants ourselves because there wasn’t anyone there to help you with that. A lot of kids, their only vocation is athletics, but if you can get them into school and get them around educated people a lot of times that rubs off on them.”

 

Carey was known for giving troubled kids a second chance at Salem, but they were always on a very short leash with him.

 

“I used to tell my president at Salem all the time, ‘Give me a semester to get them in line and if they don’t get in line then I’ll deal with them. Let’s try and help them, but if we can’t help them and they don’t want to be helped then they’ve got to leave.’”

 

As Carey began to take on more roles to increase his salary, first as athletic director and then as dean of students when the school couldn’t locate an acceptable replacement, the strain of those additional roles really began to wear on him. At the time he was also raising a young family with his wife, Cheryl.

 

More of his time was being devoted to things away from the basketball court as he began taking on more responsibilities.

 

“They fired the dean of students and the president asked me to help them out until they could find a permanent replacement,” Carey said. “Well, they didn’t hire anybody so I would work that job from eight until 12 in the morning, and then I would go over and take care of the athletic department from 12 until practice and then I was the head basketball coach.”

 

So when the West Virginia women’s basketball job came open following a 5-22 season in 2001, Carey decided it was time to make a career change.

 

“(Athletic director) Ed Pastilong took a big gamble on me and I owe him everything,” Carey said. “It’s a small world. Harry Hartman coached with Ed at Salem and Rich Rodriguez was at Salem with me, another friend of mine, so that’s how it all came about.”

 

Pastilong took some heat for hiring Carey – from women in the profession angry that he was giving the job to a man and from supporters of the women’s program who felt Carey wasn’t the right fit based on his prior coaching background and concerns about how his style would mesh with young women.

 

“When I found out he got the West Virginia women’s job I thought to myself, ‘great coach but he’ll never make it coaching the girls,’” Baker said. “Boy was I wrong.”

 

Carey, too, wasn’t sure what he had gotten himself into.

 

“Then we began playing games in the Big East and they were just picking us up and putting us off the floor and no calls were being made,” Carey said. “Once that started happening I realized I could go back to coaching the way I always coached. I thought, this is OK. I knew then that we were going to fit in just fine.”

 

When Carey was announced as West Virginia’s new women’s coach, he didn’t get a single congratulatory phone call from the other women’s coaches in the Big East.

 

Other than the guys he coached against in the West Virginia Conference, Carey can only recall two calls that he received – one coming from a guy who operated a high school girl’s scouting service who wanted him to buy some subscriptions, and another coming from a person whose name he can no longer remember.

 

“He congratulated me on getting the job and asked me if I knew so and so. I said I didn’t. He began naming more names, wondering if I knew this person and that person and I said, no, no, no, no, no and no,” Carey said. “At the end of our conversation all he said was, ‘Well, the only thing I can tell you is good luck!’”

 

When Carey went to his first AAU event to evaluate prospects that summer his reception from the other women’s coaches there was less than welcoming, which is understandable considering what many of them had to go through during their careers just to be taken seriously by their athletic department peers.

 

Here was just one more guy coming along to take away another good job from a deserving female, they thought.

 

The first female coach to open her arms and welcome Carey into the profession was Virginia’s Debbie Ryan – the same Debbie Ryan who gave Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma his big break in the game back in 1981.

 

Carey has never forgotten that.

 

“She was the one coach who went out of her way to make me feel somewhat comfortable,” Carey said.

 

Fifteen years later, Carey counts many, many friends in the coaching profession, from Villanova’s Harry Perretta to Louisville’s Jeff Walz to Michigan’s Kim Barnes-Arico, although he admits the circle of friends in Division I women’s basketball is much tighter than it was on the small-college level.

 

“I’ve found at this level it’s a little bit different than at the D-II level,” said Carey. “At the D-II level there is much more camaraderie because of what we all had to go through.”

 

Today, through a lot of hard work and an unwillingness to compromise his principles, Mike Carey has elevated West Virginia women’s basketball to a completely different level.

 

When he took the job, the expectation at the time was for him to win half of his games, keep his players out of trouble and make sure they graduated.

 

 

“I was not going to be happy just going .500,” he said. “I’ll keep them out of trouble and we’ll do the right things; I’ll make sure they go to class, but I am going to fight until we get what we feel we need to win more than we lose. My goal is never to be .500.”

 

Consequently, the goals for West Virginia women’s basketball have changed dramatically. The expectations here are to win 20 games, vie for conference championships and qualify for the national tournament on a yearly basis.

 

And Mike Carey wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

“That’s the way we want it,” he said. “We need to show them some better banners and some bigger trophies. That’s the goal.”

 

Men’s coach Bob Huggins, who shares the same practice facility with Carey, has been impressed with what Carey has been able to accomplish with the WVU women through the years.

 

“Mike’s teams guard,” he said. “There were years when I thought he did a way better job than what we did in those principles. They did a much better job in terms of gapping things, their help was better and that’s teaching.

 

“Now, length, ability and all that stuff enters into the equation, but the reality is if you don’t get them as a coach where they’re supposed to be they can’t make a play. I just know he does a great job of coaching – guys that can coach can coach, and Mike can coach men, women or whatever.”

 

“I’m tickled to death that he’s at West Virginia now because he’s a good guy and a good coach,” Griffith said. “Now he’s a damned task maker and he doesn’t put up with anything from anybody, but it’s just wonderful when he got that job because his whole life changed after that. He was so deserving and I couldn’t be happier for him.”

 

“The lapses in time between visits have not diminished my affection for him, almost as if he were my own son,” Rice added. “It gives me great pleasure to hear about him and read about him.”

 

His old high school coach certainly has had a lot to read about over the last 15 years, that’s for sure. At the rate Mike Carey continues to win basketball games, there will be plenty more to read about him in the future.