City of Basketball Love

Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2024-25 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 4. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season, click here.)

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Andrew Carr was caught up in the surreal for a moment.

He stood there and looked around Kentucky’s fabled Rupp Arena, nodded, and looked around again to reassure himself in late April. This was really happening. The 2020 West Chester East graduate has come a long way from his West Chester driveway, where he first dunked a basketball. Out of high school, the spaghetti-thin kid with the burgeoning game was getting Patriot League and Coastal Athletic Conference (CAA) attention, and some faint major Division I looks, though nothing substantial.

In five years, Carr has gone from a spot starter his freshman year at Delaware, to starting his sophomore year, to growing his game and transferring to Wake Forest his junior and senior years starting in all 68 games there for the Demon Deacons, to now this, starting as a graduate student for one of the nation’s blue blood programs, Kentucky, under new Wildcats’ head coach Mark Pope this season.    

“Back in high school, I honestly would have never even dreamed this, but just in general, the college basketball landscape has changed so, so much since I even entered college,” said Carr, who was fourth on Wake Forest in scoring (13.5) last season, third in minutes per game (32.5) and second on the team averaging 6.8 rebounds per game. “When I went to Delaware in 2020, a lot of people went to a school and stayed at a school for four years. Being at Kentucky wasn’t even part of my thinking at the time. I’m super excited to embrace the culture and the people here at Kentucky. I grew two or three inches since high school, and probably gained around 40 pounds. That growth has helped me translate into growth on the court.”

Indeed, Carr is listed by Kentucky at 6-foot-11, 235 pounds. He left East four years ago as a rail-thin 6-8, 195. Pope, who takes over at Kentucky for the legendary John Calipari, now at Arkansas, will start Carr as a hybrid stretch four or five. Calipari left after some cracks in the wall began appearing, like getting upset by Oakland in the first round of last year’s NCAA Tournament, getting upset by St. Peter’s in the opening round of the 2022 tournament, and finishing 9-16 in the COVID-truncated 2020-21 season and not making the NCAA Tournament at all.

Pope is looking at a rebuild with a roster filled with transfers like Carr, who will be among six fifth-year seniors on the Wildcats, along with one senior, three juniors, a sophomore and three freshmen. The Wildcats, who finished 23-10 overall last year, are ranked No. 23 in both the AP and the Coaches Top 25 poll.

Pope, who comes from BYU and was a captain on Kentucky’s 1996 national championship team under Rick Pitino, will be piecing together a team putting a strong emphasis on experienced players like Carr. Pope likes his teams to shoot threes, play fast, with a lot of cutting, and is offensive minded. BYU averaged 35 threes a game. Pope will not be changing that.

He likes Carr’s versatile offensive game, and his adroit passing ability and playmaking out of the post.

“We will be a green-light team and we want everyone to be very aggressive. We want to earn each other’s shots, which is really important,” Pope said. “Our guys all have a feel for that, which will be fun to watch them grow. We have six (fifth-year seniors). This will be one of the most experienced teams in the history of Kentucky basketball. We don’t have a single player on the team that’s worn a Kentucky jersey. Where can we lean? Can we lean on our experience? We have an urgency to go fast. Andrew fits in really well with what we do. He defends, he has range. He was born to play my style. The lifeblood and what makes Kentucky a special place are people like Andrew.”

How Carr wound up at Kentucky is a bit of an odyssey in itself. Carr, with his parents, Darby and Phil, took in three different schools in three days, first going to Texas Tech, then to Kentucky, then finishing at Villanova. Carr and his family landed in Nashville around 1:30 a.m. from their visit to Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas. Pope was there in Nashville to pick up Carr and his family for the three-hour drive to Lexington.

“The thing is, Andrew was fine, but mom and dad were like, ‘would you please stop talking,’ around 1:30 in the morning,” recalled Pope, laughing.

Added Andrew, “If you want to really get to know somebody, take a three-hour drive with them.”

The Carrs went on their torrid journey during the last weekend of April. After Kentucky, they headed toward home and Villanova.

“All the trips were amazing, but it really came down to Villanova and Kentucky,” Carr said. “I loved how all the staffs treated me and my family. I just felt a great connection with the coaching staff at Kentucky and it felt right. That’s what sold me. It took me a little time, and I didn’t commit right then. I had to go to Villanova. But Villanova was a little uncertain where their future was and who was going to be with them. Roster-wise, I felt a little more comfortable with Kentucky. I fell in love with coach Pope and the connection there and his style of play. It fit me better.”

Carr graduated with a communications degree from Wake Forest and will be earning a certificate in Sport, Fitness & Recreation Management at Kentucky, which could lead one day into coaching. He has an NIL deal, though preferred not to speak specifically about it.

To test the NBA waters last spring, Carr went through the NBA Draft process and received feedback from several NBA teams. Some teams told him he should work on extending his game and being a stretch four or put on more pounds to be a five. Carr prefers being more a stretch four. The constructive criticism he received from the NBA scouts stressed being a better close-out defender and getting physically stronger. The positives focused on his impact-winning attitude, his ability to stretch the floor in today’s NBA at his height, and his ability to do many of the unforeseen things only coaches see.

The closest Carr will be to home this season comes on Saturday, December 21, when the Wildcats play Ohio State at Madison Square Garden at 5:30 p.m.

Five years ago, if someone approached Carr in his Paoli driveway, and told him that he would wrap up his college basketball career at a blue blood like Kentucky, he admits he would have thought that they were nuts at first.

“Back then, I definitely didn’t see this,” Carr admitted. “I’ve grown enough as a person and a player in these last five years. I have one year left and this is a great way to do it. Kentucky has a bunch of new guys and we are ready to shock the world.”

Carr has done more than his share of that personally already.

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Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who began writing for CoBL in 2021 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on Twitter here [mobile.twitter.com].