By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

ELKINS, W. Va. — Davis & Elkins head women’s basketball coach Donna Carr was in a basketball gym, trying hard to focus on a scouting mission, but her phone was blowing up.

There was a message every 30 seconds.

“Phone blowing up like that, you don’t expect it to be good news,” Carr said with a laugh. “You’re almost afraid to look. But this was good news, very good news.”

It had been posted on Facebook that Carr had been elected as a member of the Salisbury-Rowan Sports Hall of Fame class of 2024. Friends back home, most of them in Salisbury, had seen it, and they were letting Carr know about it.

Those calls to the hall can take a while. They usually come out of the blue. The Salisbury-Rowan Hall of Fame didn’t induct its first class until 2001. Only a handful of qualified candidates are inducted each year, so it will never catch up with the county’s many decades of sports history. But the Hall did finally catch up Carr, a high school phenom at Salisbury High three decades ago. She graduated in 1994-95 after leading a complete turnaround of the program.

“Best memory of Salisbury basketball is coming over from Knox Middle School with a lot of expectations for me and my class,” Carr said. “I was welcomed warmly by the older players. There were some growing years, learning years, but my senior year, we left there as champions.”

Carr’s memory is accurate. Salisbury re-started a girls basketball program in 1975 and was good that season, mostly due to a special player named Carol Almond. The Hornets wouldn’t win more than they lost again until 1983-84 when they went 20-10. Then they had another slumber party before the seasons when Carr, Carmen Weldon, Devina Dixon and role players, including Ashley Boulware (you know her now as West Rowan coach Ashley Poole), won the program’s first Christmas tournament in 1994 and the first conference championship in 1995.

“Rowan County basketball was so good,” Carr said. “I had great girls to compete with at every school in the county and they pushed me hard.”

Salisbury’s girls bottomed out for coach De Batchelor in 1990-91 with a 1-22 record. Carr arrived in 1991-02, and the Hornets gradually changed the scoreboard. The Hornets were 23-5 Carr’s senior season. Carr averaged 15,6, 15.7, 17.0 and 18.9 points per game in her four seasons. Her 1,659 points were the program record when she graduated, although that total has been topped by Shayla Fields and Kyla Bryant.

They play more games now, so third place on an all-time list is strong for a lady who graduated high school nearly 30 years ago. Carr saved her best for West Montgomery, including a 38-point effort her senior season.

“The game I remember most is the last one I played for Salisbury, even though we lost it,” Carr said. “It was a hard loss at Catawba (to Ledford) in the sectionals. We fought hard, but Devina was hurt, and it was a tough game.”

As good as she was in basketball in high school, Carr didn’t do it year-round. She dominated on the volleyball court for the Hornets in the fall. In every track and field meet, she had a chance to win four events — the discus, shot put, triple jump and high jump. When she graduated, her discus throw of over 117 feet was the second-best in school history.

She signed with the University of South Carolina’s basketball program, and the 5-foot-11 Carr, who ha dominated in the post in high school with her strength and quickness, made a transition to college small forward.

“I remember playing against Florida early in my college career, and they had the twin towers (6-foot-1 DeLisha Milton and 6-foot-2 Murriel Page). I saw an opening, went in for a layup, and then out of nowhere there’s an arm blocking my shot,” Carr said. “The tower that blocked it said, ‘Welcome to the SEC!’ That was kind of that moment that has always stayed with me. I got my nose broken in the SEC. It was definitely a different level of physicality and I would have to adjust.”

College conditioning also was different.

“I remember we were running suicides in the gym,” Carr said. “I ran so hard I knew I was going to be sick, and I kept running straight out the door of the gym. It was kind of a Forrest Gump moment. I just kept on running.”

She survived the suicide drills. She wasn’t a star during her three seasons with the Gamecocks, but she was a solid player, usually averaging more rebounds than points. She was eighth in the SEC in rebounding with 7.1 per game in 1997-98 and was in the top 20 in the league in steals.

Family considerations ended her time at South Carolina, but after two seasons away from the game she made a glorious comeback for the Catawba Indians with her last season of eligibility in 2000-01. She shot 55 percent from the field and was a tremendous force for a 25-5 team that won the South Atlantic Conference regular season and SAC Tournament. She was the league MVP.

“There was a lot of joy that season, with me coming home to play for Coach (John) Duncan,” Carr said. “Every game was like a homecoming. There was a lot of defensive teamwork with Dorthell Little. There were tall girls that maybe we couldn’t stop one-on-one, but together we stopped them. And there were a lot of give-and-gos with Lakai Brice (now the Salisbury High head coach).”

After earning a degree in sociology from Catawba, Carr played pro ball in Finland.

Since then, she’s split time in the corporate world and the coaching world, and she’s had some jobs that required both skills.

While coaching AAU ball, she decided that’s what she enjoyed the most.

She’s coached mostly in Florida, in the Tampa area, but the most recent move on her long coaching journey brought her to West Virginia and Davis & Elkins College.

“The timing was right when I got a call from West Virginia telling me that they needed a coach,” Carr said. “A West Virginia D-II program (Glenville State) had just won the national championship and I knew there were West Virginia schools getting bids to the tournament. I’d just been through another terrible storm in Florida, and I decided that was going to be my last hurricane. I packed up my stuff and made the hike north. Snow and all, I’ve never regretted it for a minute.”

Carr comes home for her mother’s birthdays and she still stays in touch with Poole and Brice after all these years.

She’d like to recruit one of their players some day to play for Davis & Elkins. She tried to recruit West Rowan’s Emma Clarke after seeing her in action last season, but Clarke’s heart was set on softball at Tennessee.

On Aug. 10, Carr will come home again — for induction into the Salisbury-Rowan Hall of Fame.