Carr looking forward to next coaching stint
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When it comes to sports, building relationships and connecting with the local community helps draw fans and spectators to games. Whether you're a coach connecting with a business or maybe an athlete connecting with youth, building just one relationship can go a long way. That is how former Lock Haven University wrestling assistant coach Nate Carr approached his job and the community.
A little over two weeks ago, Carr announced that he would be stepping away from his role as a coach at LHU and taking on a role elsewhere: "For the past six years, I've been blessed to serve as Lock Haven University's assistant wrestling coach. In that time, I've learned, grown and achieved far more what I thought possible. I have been given an opportunity to further my career as the head wrestling coach at Davidson College."
After serving as the assistant under coach Scott Moore for six seasons--including the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic year--Carr was hired as the lead guy at Davidson College. In Carr's six seasons as an assistant, he helped coach Moore lead teams with a total of nine world/Olympic players, nine NCAA champions and 45 NCAA All-Americans.
To say Carr was an accomplished coach at LHU is clear, but that can also be an understatement. Carr's accomplishments and what he helped his players achieve was important in his players' growth and learning. But now that he is leaving the community, what will stand out most to him in his six-year tenure as an assistant are the relationships he built and the community of Lock Haven as a whole.
"Just the relationships I built with the guys and the community (is what will stay in my heart)," Carr said. "The guys, the locals and alumni that I built relationships with and helping create the white out is something I'll always appreciate."
Carr helped build something special in the white out theme with the wrestling program. The white out--a theme where spectators wear white at a specific wrestling home game to attract the local community and university--was started in 2017, his first season as an assistant. His overall goal was to get increased support from both the campus community and the local community, and it is something that turned out to be successful pretty quickly.
"I also appreciate beating Rutgers in the first white out and the guys giving all their effort on the mat and in the community," Carr mentioned. "Doing things to continue to honor the tradition it already had and taking that to next level with all the hard work was good."
While continuing to build LHU's wrestling community, Carr also continued to grow as a coach. Along with engaging the community as much as he could, he wanted to engage his players each season and build relationships with them so that performance could be at its maximum capacity.
In the role of many assistant coaches, some of the goals most have are to learn as much from the head coach, whether you want to be a head coach one day or not. Learning and understanding how to manage and operate a team is important, which helps to generate even more success on the mat.
"Coach Moore allowed me to thrive in areas such as marketing, putting events together and being in the community. I was able to learn to build relationships with people," coach Carr said. "Wrestling was involved in some ways, but Lock Haven allowed me to connect with others. I learned being smart with how to manage a team, learning how to wrestle a tough match and thinking of the little details of how a program goes in the right direction."
After learning the necessary skills needed to be the best assistant coach he could be, coach Carr now feels ready to lead another school's program to new heights. He was able to learn all the intricacies of being a head coach, and now he has a program that he can call his own. With calling a program your own, challenges will arise, but they will be good challenges--like building a system for his players--that he looks forward to.
"When you become the head coach, it's your program. You must protect your program and learn to be real with your athletes and those in the community," Carr said. "Getting a belief system is something that I must get across to my guys. "It's lonely at the top sometimes and you have to make the decisions--and you have to be confident in the decisions you make--because as the head guy it falls on you."
As coach Carr heads down to Davidson College in North Carolina, he will look to take on the challenge of not only building his own system, but also relationship building and connecting to a local community to lead the Wildcats in a new direction. As he departs from Lock Haven, Carr hopes to have left a lasting impact on both his players and the community.
"I want to be remembered as a guy that was passionate about every aspect of the Lock Haven community," said Carr. "I fought for my guys and believed in my guys. Without Lock Haven I wouldn't be here today. I came in, made some changes to Lock Haven, gave them all my energy and time. And in return, I learned a lot about how to develop guys even more."