By Mike London
Salisbury Post
STATESBORO, Ga. – The phone call from new Georgia Southern women’s basketball coach Heather Macy brought one of those full-circle moments for Donna Carr.
Twenty-five years ago, Macy was an assistant coach at Catawba College, a program where the first-team All-South Atlantic Conference players were Salisbury High grad Carr and Lakai Brice, who would later win state championships as Salisbury High’s head coach. There were a lot of Brice-to-Carr give-and-gos in 2001.
There’s more. Now that she’s on the staff at Georgia Southern, Carr will help coach Brice’s daughter, Kyla Bryant, a rising senior guard for the Eagles.
A small world, indeed.
“Coaching Lakai’s daughter will be fun and should be a really good experience for both of us,” Carr said. “I know Kyla. She broke my record. We’ll have a lot of ties to Salisbury here, and Salisbury always will be such a special place for me.”
When Carr graduated from Salisbury in 1995, she held the program scoring record with 1,659 points. Then Shayla Fields came along and scored 2,783, shattering school as well as county records. Bryant scored 1,809 despite a COVID-shortened season, so Bryant is second in program history, sitting there in elite company between Fields and Carr.
Bryant, who led Salisbury High to back-to-back state titles in 2022 and 2023, played her first two college seasons at North Carolina Central, scored a lot of points, posted the first triple-double in program history and racked up a nice stack of accolades.
She was All-MEAC third team and MEAC All-Rookie as a freshman.
As a sophomore, she averaged 13.1 points, was seventh in the MEAC in scoring and fifth in assists. She was second team All-MEAC. She rarely left the floor, playing 36 minutes per game.
In the spring of 2025, Bryant announced she was transferring to Georgia Southern to compete in the Sun Belt Conference.
While her personal minute and stats – 5.3 points, 1.3 assists – declined, she was valuable for a championship team, making eight starts and coming off the bench early in the other 23 games. The best part for her was winning like she had in high school. Georgia Southern was very stout in the regular season, 14-1 at home, 16-2 in the Sun Belt Conference and 23-8 overall.
March wasn’t as much fun as February with lopsided Georgia Southern losses to James Madison in the Sun Belt tournament and Miami in the WBIT, but it was a solid year for Bryant, who capped things off with academic All-District honors.
Hana Haden, head coach for Georgia Southern last season, was announced as the new Memphis coach in March. In early April, Georgia Southern hired Macy, who has won everywhere she’s been, most recently at Nova Southeastern, to replace her.
When Macy began assembling a staff, Carr, who was recently the head coach at D2 Davis & Elkins in West Virginia, was a hire that made a lot of sense.
“We’ve always stayed in touch and she’s always been a mentor,” Carr said. “Her track record speaks loud. Her teams win.”
As a player, Carr got things turned around at Salisbury High after a lot of losing seasons in girls basketball. Salisbury was 1-22 the season before she arrived. Her senior year, Salisbury won 23 games (the school record at the time), won the conference championship for the first time and won the Christmas Tournament at Catawba for the first time. Carr played in the post at 5-foot-11 and was too quick and active for opposing centers to handle.
In track and field, Carr competed on state runner-up teams. Her discus throw of 117 feet, 7.5 inches ranked second in school history when she graduated. She finished third in the state in the discus her senior year, the last time she would wear the uniform of the Hornets.
While she’s made a living coaching basketball for decades, Carr’s favorite high school sport to play was volleyball. She was a dominant force and her volleyball prowess helped make her the Rowan County Female Athlete of the Year for 1994-95 and a member of the Salisbury-Rowan Hall of Fame.
“I actually enjoyed volleyball the most,” Carr said. “Loved it. If volleyball had been as big in 1995 as it is now, I probably would have gone that way and played volleyball in college.”
As much as she enjoyed competing for the Hornets in volleyball and track and field, the scholarship money being offered was mostly for basketball, so Carr headed for the University of South Carolina to compete in the SEC.
She played in 63 games for the Gamecocks, making a successful transition from post player to small forward. She was eighth in the SEC in rebounding with 7.1 per game in 1997-98. She had a role to play and accepted it. A lot of nights, she had more rebounds than points.
“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),” Carr said. “I saw an opening, went in for a layup, and then out of nowhere there’s an arm blocking my shot. 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 knew I had to adjust.”
Family considerations brought her home. After two years away from the game, she made a comeback and played her final college season at Catawba alongside Brice. Carr shot 55 percent for a 25-5 team, made first team All-SAC and was SAC tourney MVP. She graduated with a degree in sociology.
Carr played pro ball in Finland. She also spent time in the corporate world before deciding to become a full-time coach.
“I’ve coached at a lot of levels of basketball,” Carr said. “I’ve done about all of it. Travel ball, high school, D3 and D2. Now I’m back in D1, really for the first time since I played at South Carolina.”
Carr is proud of the time she spent at Davis & Elkins, a tough place to win.
“We weren’t in a position to compete with the best teams in our league, but I made it my business to let people know who we were, and we expanded recruiting,” Carr said. “We made progress. We got recruits from California, Texas and Arizona.”
Carr got used to the ice and snow, but the South is still her favorite place to live.
So the call to move to Georgia was welcomed. Carr said she found a nice home in a new development and has gone to work every day with enthusiasm since she was hired.
Georgia Southern is not far from Savannah. It’s about three hours southeast of Atlanta.
Georgia Southern will have eight new players in the program next season, so returners such as Bryant are going to be very important.
“We came into a situation that is not a typical rebuild because they were good last year and had a lot of energy in the program,” Carr said. “But there are also some higher goals that haven’t been met yet. There’s more building to do.”
Carr said her coaching days are long and fast-paced as the Eagles gear up for a new season. She loves the hustle and bustle of being part of a new team.
“When you choose to become a basketball coach, you know it’s not going to be a 9 to 5 life,” Carr said. “But when you love what you’re doing as much as I do, it’s not work. I love the grind and we’re grinding.”
