Carey continues Salford link

LOOKING ahead to life in the Championship, newly-promoted Oldham RL Club have added to their coaching staff with the appointment on a one-year contract of Peter Carey, who worked at Salford Red Devils for many years.

Carey (47) will tonight line up alongside his former Salford coaching colleagues Scott Naylor and Lee Spencer at Oasis Academy Oldham when Roughyeds report for the start of pre-season training.

To make the transition from League One champions to Championship new boys, head coach Naylor will now have two lieutenants in Spencer and Carey as well as a third hand-picked member of his backroom team in Kane Daniels, who will be responsible for the squad’s strength and conditioning.

Said Carey: “When Scott (Naylor) invited me to join him and ‘Spanner’ (Spencer) at Oldham I snatched his hand off.

“He’s the best coach I’ve ever worked with and the opportunity to do it again was too good to turn down.

“A lot of the Oldham players were with me at Salford when they were younger, either in the under-18s or under-21s, and I was impressed with how they had come on when I watched Roughyeds in a few games at the back end of last season.

“I’m excited by this new role. I can’t wait to get started.”

Carey’s appointment will enable Naylor, 2015 League One coach of the year, to oversee an extended programme of coaching and preparation to meet the higher demands of Oldham’s new status in the Championship.

Explained club chairman Chris Hamilton: “Scott felt he needed another pair of hands in order to continue the work he and ‘Spanner’ have been doing for the past three years, but also to add other aspects of coaching to meet the bigger challenges that lie ahead.

“The coaching team will now be able to do specific work with individual players, spend more time analysing the opposition, and do more video work and other things like that to get maximum benefit from bringing in another experienced coach.”

Carey played for Swinton amateur side Folly Lane for 28 years before he was introduced to coaching, like Spencer, by the inspirational Don Preston, a father figure to scores of prospective coaches in and around Salford and Swinton over many years.

He worked initially with Salford Service Area squads and then joined Spencer in coaching the Reds’ scholars.

At the invitation of Alan Hunte, head of youth development at Salford, he later became head coach of the Foundation side (under-16s) before progressing to assistant boss of the under-18s, a role he performed for several years,

A spell at Swinton Lions, where he worked with a new under-21s squad, was followed by a return to Salford in 2007 when he was asked by Hunte to look after the Reds’ under-21s with Naylor.

After two years in that role he became head coach of the academy and under-19s teams, having previously gained experience working on the RFL’s regional camps.

His Salford service ended in 2014, whereupon he returned to his former amateur club, Folly Lane, as first-team head coach in 2015.