“It’s trains, planes and automobiles. All the time.”
That’s what Darby Carr told us inside a buzzing KFC Yum! Center, ahead of Purdue volleyball’s Sweet 16 showdown against the No. 1 seed and regional host team, Louisville.
This particular trip warranted a flight, as Darby and her husband, Philip, left their home in West Chester, Pennsylvania and headed south, toward Kentucky. One of their four children, their only daughter, was getting ready to compete in the NCAA Tournament, and they were thrilled.
Lizzie Carr, Purdue’s sophomore middle blocker, averaged 1.52 kills per set, hitting .301 with 73 terminations credited to her name.
“She’s really done an awesome job this year trying to be able to help the team wherever she can,” her older brother and current Kentucky men’s basketball player, Andrew Carr, told us ahead of the tournament.
The game fell on a Thursday, meaning Andrew and the UK men’s basketball team were just days away from their own meeting with the Cardinals, to be played 76.6 miles down the road, in Lexington.
“Hopefully [Lizzie and the Boilermakers] beat them Thursday, and then we’ll handle Louisville Saturday,” Andrew told us earlier that week. “That’s what we’re hoping for: the Carrs take down Louisville.”
Ultimately, the No. 1 seed prevailed, 3-0. With the Cardinals in the win column, the Purdue volleyball season came to an end, two days before the annual Cats vs. Cards showdown on the hardwood.
The Louisville men’s basketball team didn’t find the same fate.
Andrew Carr finished with ten points and a team-high nine rebounds, with his younger sister, fresh off her team’s season-ending loss, in the building. The Wildcats left Rupp Arena with a 93-85 win in a “Battle of the Bluegrass” billed nationally as the next chapter in a storied rivalry.
For the Carrs, it was less about Mark Pope and Pat Kelsey, and more about their family converging in the commonwealth. A Thursday night volleyball match in Louisville followed by a Saturday afternoon basketball game in Lexington was hardly the hardest they’d hustled that fall.
In addition to all of the Kentucky basketball games and Purdue volleyball matches, Philip and Darby were also constantly tracking Virginia Tech men’s basketball, where their youngest son, Peter, is a freshman.
"Our oldest son, Alexander, is in California, so he keeps tabs on everybody," Philip said.
“Some people have bucket lists. We have arena lists,” Darby told us before tipoff of the Kentucky-Louisville basketball game. “Andrew played at Delaware, in the CAA. Then he moved to the ACC. Now he’s in the SEC. Lizzie’s in the Big Ten; Peter’s in the ACC. We have this list of all of the arenas, and we always pick the games we want to go to so we can check off the arena list.”
Philip then began to rattle off some of the most-famous arenas in the country: Allen Fieldhouse, check. Cameron Indoor, check. The Dean Dome, check.
“Man, it’s crazy,” Philip said with a smile, before adding Wisconsin, Nebraska, Charleston and Florida to the list, just to name a few.
Where does Rupp Arena rank?
“By far the best,” Darby said definitively.
“We’re not just saying it,” Philip added. “It is steps above. It’s unbelievable.”
“There’s nothing like it, the [Kentucky] fan base,” Darby said. “It’s just been such a joy to be part of it. We’re so grateful for how they’ve welcomed us, Andrew, the rest of the team, to Lexington and really made it feel like it’s family.”
The Big Blue Nation added a new member to its family tree just a few days later, when the Kentucky volleyball program announced Lizzie as its latest addition via the transfer portal.
Kentucky Volleyball ✍️ Lizzie Carr! pic.twitter.com/b16Tof0Xjt
— BBN Tonight (@BBNTonight) December 19, 2024
After entering the portal, Lizzie was careful to consider all of her options, without narrowing in on any particular program too quickly. She’d already attempted to make a volleyball decision based on Andrew once before, and her mom was having no part of it.
“When I was first getting recruited [in high school], when Andrew was at Delaware, I said 'I’m going to go to Delaware because Andrew’s at Delaware,'” Lizzie told us now. “My mom was like, ‘No, you’re not. Nothing against Delaware, but that’s not why you’re making your decision.’”
Now in the portal, the same premise applied.
“I talked to a few other coaches and was looking at the schools I was talking to, but I had seen Kentucky,” Lizzie remembers of the re-recruiting process, this time as a mid-year sophomore. “It was like: ‘Would I go there over Kentucky? Would I go there over Kentucky?’ I was very quickly able to narrow down the list.”
Andrew had planned on giving his younger sister his version of the campus tour while she was in town for the Kentucky versus Louisville basketball game.
But coincidentally, the Kentucky volleyball season ended in the Elite Eight that same afternoon, putting head coach Craig Skinner on a flight back to Lexington. He, smartly, wasted no time in talking with the 6-foot-6 middle who just so happened to already be in town.
Best way to spend timeouts? Watching Kentucky volleyball, of course!!! 🏐🏐 pic.twitter.com/wTyD8gw0Hi
— BBN Tonight (@BBNTonight) December 14, 2024
“I got kicked off, downgraded a little bit, but that’s alright,” Andrew said of his tour-that-never-was. Craig Skinner’s did the trick.
“She ended up going on the tour with Coach Skinner the next day instead. She came back and said she loved it. I kind of walked around with her again a little bit after that and got to show her some of the basketball stuff, too,” Andrew says now, looking over at his sister. “You made the decision pretty quickly after that.”
“There’s nothing else I’ve been able to identify that I’d want to do more than that,” Carr said of joining the program that's hung eight-straight SEC Championship banners.
The “Carr trips” of the fall - back and forth between West Lafayette, Lexington, and the road games in between - have now faded into a not-so-distant memory. Lizzie’s been able to go to all of Andrew’s home games so far this semester, and Andrew’s hopeful his schedule will allow him to attend any volleyball scrimmages that are scheduled for this spring.
Although it will cut down on their frequent-flyer points, it’s surely a relief to the true MVP of the family.
The most-valuable parents, that is.
“My parents do an awesome job trying to bend over backward trying to get everywhere for us,” Andrew says. “It means a lot.”
Kentucky fans know that’s an understatement.
The story has become a small part of the larger lore surrounding Mark Pope’s unrelenting spirit this season. Tasked with constructing a roster in record time, Kentucky’s new head coach had no time to waste. So when those planes, trains or automobiles hit a snag, as one did while the Carrs were attempting to travel to Lexington for Andrew’s official visit, Pope sprung into action. He personally drove to Nashville after midnight to pick up the Carrs from the Nashville airport.
In hindsight, it’s clear the brand-new staff lucked into one of the most well-traveled families in the sport. The Carrs had it handled.
“I was working with the Kentucky staff, and they were like, ‘how do you know how to book all of these flights on different airlines?,’” Darby says now, adding they provided first, second and third-choice options to the staff.
“It’s just because of all of the travel with the kids and being there to get to all of the games. Wanting to support, as parents, their athletic pursuits. It just means the world to them, and it’s so wonderful for us to get to participate in that and be there to support them.”
“Our family is pretty close knit, particularly Andrew and Lizzie,” Darby told us ahead of that December volleyball match that brought Lizzie’s Boilermakers, and her older brother, into the Yum! Center.
“They’ve supported each other a tremendous amount. For him, it’s: ‘Of course I’m going to come. If I can come, I’m going to be there.’ And Lizzie, she’s over the moon. She’s the only girl in the family, and to have him here supporting her just means the world.”
Andrew and Lizzie readily admit they have not always been this close. In fact, they both laughed when Lizzie let it slip: “we hated each other the most.”
“Oh yeah,” Andrew nodded. “We did not like each other.”
What they described as “hate” sounds - at least to me, an outsider - less like red-hot rage, and more like most light-hearted squabbles amongst brothers and sisters.
“Anyone with a sibling will relate to this,” I thought to myself, as I watched Andrew shake his head and recall Lizzie’s penchant for a good, old-fashioned cry. He insists the tears were fake, and yet they always seemed to land him in hotter water than her.
Lizzie laughed, but ultimately agreed.
“As the only girl, sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. You’re clawing to survive sometimes. They can handle it.”
Before their shared love of competition meant a trio of Division-I athletes, it first led to a ban on board games.
“We got to a point where we literally could not play games as a family because we were all way too competitive,” Lizzie confesses. “Now, we’re grown enough to do it; we were young enough to do it. But there was a point in the middle where we had a hard time.”
With all feud-inducing classics off the table, the Carrs turned away from games that prioritized competition between a winner and a loser, instead choosing teamwork-forward activities.
For that reason, puzzles and Lego's still hold a special place in their hearts.
“Our whole family enjoys it,” they tell me, with Andrew first describing a Harry Potter inspired Hogwarts castle set that was built, lit (lights not included) and displayed on top of their cabinets, followed by Lizzie’s story of her Lego flowers she keeps in a vase.
Still, that competitive fire is hard to extinguish.
“We’d still hide the last piece so we could be the one to put in the last piece of the puzzle,” Lizzie shared, a bit sheepishly. “Honestly, we still do that if we’re all doing a puzzle together.”
They get it honestly.
Their dad, Philip Carr, and uncle, Tim Carr, both played basketball for Delaware in the ‘80s. Both Andrew and Lizzie picked up the sport from a young age, remembering hours and hours spent with a ball in their hands. Or at least, the idea of one.
“That was our thing. We’d lay down in bed or around the house and shoot the ball straight up-and-down," Andrew said, mimicking a shooting motion, pointing directly up toward the ceiling. "Before you’d go to bed, you’d shoot.”
When Lizzie, who played basketball competitively through her freshman year of high school, went through a growth spurt she described as “growing faster than you could gain muscle [or] eat food,” her dad encouraged push-ups and sit-ups to maintain her strength.
She laughs now, insisting Andrew complied more than she did, hence his athletic success. When I point out they play for the same school now, implying she must have done plenty of pushups herself, she’s proud to reveal her new strength coach, Kentucky volleyball’s John Spurlock, has recently complimented her form.
“I’m like: ‘Oh my God, thank you! You need to call my dad and tell him that!’”
The strength room is also where Andrew and Lizzie had their first accidental, mini family reunion since her move to Lexington this winter.
“I walked in there and his trainer Brandon [Wells] was like, “‘Stop! This is the first time this is happening. This is the first time! For real!’”
The situation was made funnier by the fact that, by sheer coincidence, they both arrived for their workout wearing pink, trademarking the training room’s new-favorite expression, “the Carrs wear pink on Thursdays.”
“That’s when it first hit us that we were in the same spot,” Andrew said.
It seemed to hit them, again, sitting around the kitchen table on a Tuesday night in January.
They’d been kind enough to invite us over to chat for this story, so BBN Tonight photojournalist Nick Lazaroff and I stood in the kitchen and listened intently as Lizzie and Andrew poured over thousands of tiny Lego's pieces, which would eventually (allegedly) resemble a blue car. Seriously.
“The Carrs building a car!,” Andrew said proudly.
I’m still not sure if they did that on purpose, although they did tell us the new Lego's set was a Christmas present.
As they opened the small, plastic bags filled with smaller, plastic parts, they worked as teammates, while reflecting on every domino that had to fall for them to both end up here, now.
They described their shared semester - the first time they’ve lived in the same city since high school - as a unique experience they never thought they’d have.
“No way.”
Earlier in the night, Andrew and Lizzie had told us a series of stories and behind-the-scenes tidbits from the basketball team’s trip to New York City, where Andrew proposed to his girlfriend, Genevieve.
The stories were funny, honest and somewhat typical of a slightly-nervous older brother and his sidekick sister, who helped make sure the day went smoothly. She couldn't risk missing the chance at having another girl in the family, after all.
That day - the proposal, the engagement and the life that lies ahead for Andrew and Genevieve, husband and wife - makes that cold, Tuesday night, their conversation around the kitchen table, and this story of the childhood shared by Andrew and Lizzie, the siblings, turned enemies, turned best friends, turned teammates, feel extra sentimental.
“With him being engaged, and before he really goes into the next chapter of his life fully, we kind of get to relive some of [our] childhood, being at home together. That part is really cool.”
For more on the Wildcats, watch BBN Tonight weeknights at 7:30 p.m. on the official station for UK Athletics, LEX 18.
