Dave Rose opens up on why he retired from BYU basketball, his father’s recent death, and Nick Emery’s missteps

It has been a little more than three months since Dave Rose announced he was stepping away from his pressure-filled position as BYU’s men’s basketball coach and into retirement.

In a half-hour interview with The Salt Lake Tribune last week, Rose reminisced about his 22 years in Provo, the past 14 as the leader of one of BYU’s most successful athletic programs.

Rose said he has “no regrets whatsoever” about that late-March decision to call it a career, a move that shocked many BYU supporters. At times he’s wondered if he should have retired a year or two sooner.

However long it has been, I will tell you this: my activities around town, my interactions in public, have been great,” Rose said. “With the way people have treated me, maybe I should have quit a long time ago.”

Rose said a University of Utah fan stopped him in the airport a few weeks ago and told him he loved watching his BYU teams play and respected the job he did with the Cougars.

“I said, well, one of the best things about being retired now is I can actually cheer for the Utes. That will be fun,” Rose said.

Still, most of his basketball fandom will remain focused on BYU.

“I really am looking forward to watching this next year’s team and cheering for them and seeing how they do,” Rose said. “I will keep watching, just from a different vantage point.”

At the request of former BYU star Jimmer Fredette and his brother, TJ Fredette, Rose will help coach Team Fredette in The Basketball Tournament later this month at the Maverik Center, but other than that he says he hasn’t thought about basketball much. His thoughts have been elsewhere.

Three days after former BYU assistant Mark Pope was hired to replace him, Rose’s father, Jack, died after battles with bladder, skin, prostate and stomach cancer. His funeral was April 19.

This stomach cancer was what finally got him,” Rose said. “He lived a great life. He fought cancer for a long time, but he was [doing better] and then we lost him. We thought we had a little longer, but that wasn’t the case.”

Still, the family considered it a blessing that Jack Rose hung on that long. “He was able to come to our last four or five home games,” Rose said, “and when I got home from the Final Four, I went over to visit him and we talked about all three of the games, how great the games were.”

Four days later, the man who introduced BYU’s all-time wins leader (348, pending an appeal to the NCAA over the likely loss of 47 wins in the Nick Emery improper benefits case) to the sport of basketball passed away. He was 87.

Rose and his wife, Cheryl, were hoping to travel the world and watch some of his former players such as Brandon Davies, Jonathan Tavernari and Tyler Haws, but his father’s death postponed those plans. Maybe next year.

Still, the couple has traveled to Moab, Las Vegas and Portland, Oregon (to visit a daughter who’s in law school there), and spent a couple of weeks in Hawaii while Pope and his new staff moved in.