Carbon School District press release

 

Carbon High School’s Girls Basketball Coach Ted Bianco was sitting in a
faculty meeting earlier this spring when Assistant Principal Jarad Hardy
said that it was time for a celebration because a coach at the school had
been named Utah Coach of the Year.

“When I heard that I thought it must be the girls swimming coach since they
have won three state championships in a row,” he said. “Then I heard my
name. I thought ‘What is this?’. I had no idea. I went to his office the
next morning and he actually gave me the certificate.”

He had no inkling that the Utah High School Activities Association had
submitted his name as the nominee from the state for National Coach of the
Year, consequently making him the state coach of the year. The letter
naming him as such had come to the administration, not him.

As fate would have it, the honor came in his last year as coach, and as a
teacher, at Carbon High School, since he is retiring from public education
this spring.

“I found out that the nominations come from committees inside the UHSAA and
that no one else is involved,” he stated. “They don’t even tell the person
who is chosen for some time.”

His tenure at Carbon as a coach and a teacher dates back to the mid-1990s
when he came to the school after being an assistant coach and a math
instructor at the College of Eastern Utah. But his roots in the community
are deep, much deeper than just teaching at the high school.

Bianco grew up in Price after being moved to the area from Colorado. He
attended public schools, including Carbon High, and then went on to get his
higher education at CEU and at Southern Utah University. But that’s the
short version of how he went on to be a successful coach, despite the fact
he never actually played basketball at the high school level himself.

“Who would want this body to do that?” he laughed as he said that.

His start in athletics came in high school when he was the manager for the
football team.

“I had a coach who asked me to be part of it and it was so much fun,” he
said. “That was the first time in my life when I actually got to experience
what it was like to be part of a team. Someone had actually taken me under
their wing and let me be a part of something. In my mind that is the best
thing that ever happened to me. I could have gone down an entirely
different road if that hadn’t happened.”

The head football coach at the time was also the head basketball coach and
he asked Bianco to stay on and be the manager for that team as well. Thus
his basketball career had begun.

“They taught me so much about the game and there were even times they threw
me into drills on the floor with the players,” he said as he smiled.
“Obviously that didn’t go well for me.”

Out of that, however, he got a college scholarship to CEU. He became their
equipment manager for football.

While at CEU he worked with Curt Jensen who was then the basketball coach
at the school, who he said “gave me a lot of responsibility.”

In 1987 Jensen decided not to coach anymore and the new coach, Ronnie
Stubbs, asked Bianco to stay on for a year as an assistant coach. The next
year he got a scholarship to SUU, both in academics, and to be an assistant
there where he worked for Head Basketball Coach Neil Roberts.

In the fall of 1990 he still had some classes to finish at SUU but he did
come back and assisted Stubbs. In the spring of 1991 he student taught at
Helper Junior High. Upon graduating he was hired to help with the women’s
team at CEU as an assistant to Dave Paur.

“I spent five years working for Dave,” said Bianco. “Then I was hired at
Carbon High in 1996 to teach math.”

He did no coaching that year, but the next year he went back and helped
Paur part time and was also the girls basketball coach at Mont Harmon
Junior High.

From 1998 to 2000 he helped coach the girls team at Carbon and then he
became the boys head basketball coach and served in that job for 11 years.
In 2011 he was picked not only to be athletic director for Carbon but also
moved over to the girls side of the program which is what he did up through
this year. All that time he taught math at the school instructing students
in classes that ranged from Algebra I to AP Calculus.

“It’s been quite the journey for sure,” he said.

Along with the award he just received he has been region coach of the year
three times and he was named the state athletic director associations
director of the year in 2018.

When asked about a favorite team he coached he was hesitant because he said
they were all great and a lot of fun to work with, but he did say he had a
couple he felt special about.

“When I was the boys coach the 2002-2003 team were a bunch of
over-achievers,” he said. “They played so hard and worked so hard. We had
Tyson Hackwell, Neil Maynes, Joe Moynier (now the basketball coach at Union
High School) and Jamal Lewis. We weren’t big, but we were very athletic. We
beat Wasatch High on our home court and they went on to win the state
championship that year. We also beat Emery for the first time in a long
time too. The team didn’t have a winning season that year (9-13) but you
never would have known that the way they played. They were a close knit
group and I was so proud of them.”

As girls coach he said there were so many teams that it was hard to find
one that stood out because there were so many good things that were
accomplished.

“I guess the biggest win of my career came when we beat Juan Diego on their
floor in 2013-14,” he explained. “They were a strong state tournament team
that year and we were young, but we won by 2 points.”

In fact he said some of the best wins his teams had were against that
Draper Catholic school, which is ironic because next year he is going to
keep working because he has taken the position of Athletic Director of the
Soaring Eagles.

But in typical Bianco fashion, the honors he got for anything he did over
his career he says also belongs to others, particularly the student
athletes he worked with over the years.

“A lot of getting this kind of award is the kind of kids you work with, and
I have had a lot of good kids over the years. It’s not all about me, but
about them and the other coaches that have been part of it. This award was
the highlight of my career. I have to say that I have been very fortunate,”
he concluded.