Indiana Pacers senior vice president of player personnel Ryan Carr is joining Darian DeVries staff at Indiana University.
His title will be executive director of basketball. He will report directly to DeVries.
Carr is a former IU manager under Bob Knight who was given his first NBA job with the Pacers under Larry Bird.
Carr has managed the Indiana Pacers' pre-draft for more than a decade, including the work of the scouting department, as well as evaluations of all draft prospects.
A native of the state of Washington, A Carr has been involved in scouting since 2003. He's been in charge of a scouting department that scouts domestically (mainly colleges but some high-end high school events) and internationally.
Throughout Carr's career, two of his biggest mentors were Bob Knight and Larry Bird. Three of his other mentors are NBA executives Donnie Wash, Kevin Pritchard and Chad Buchanan.
Carr started in professional basketball as an intern with the Pacers.
"If you really want to do something, given an opportunity you have to find a way to make it work," Carr told The News Tribune of Tacoma (WA) when he was honored back in Washington in 2018. "That's always been the thing for me, and even to this day I'm still a little insecure about it all. I feel like I have to outwork the people who are doing my job with the other teams. I need to be more organized. I need to keep getting better. I need to find ways for our staff to be better.
"I'm always trying to prove something – not just for the glory of it all, but because I'm an underdog."
Carr was an IU manger from 1992-96. He landed one of the coveted IU manager positions after writing a letter to Bob Knight.
Carr's first job with the Pacers was as a part time intern making $300 a month at most — pay was determined by number of home games in a month.
Carr so wanted to work in basketball, he took a part time job working late-night hours at Burger King to pay bills while a Pacers intern. When Larry Bird heard about it, Bird got Carr paid minimum wage so he could at least get by.
Carr was with the Pacers through the 1998-99 season, then went to work at UTEP. When Bird returned to the Pacers as President of Basketball Operations in 2003, he brought Carr back to the Pacers.
Larry Bird once said this about Carr: "I don't like guys who when I get into a meeting with my scouts here and the first thing the guy says is, 'Well, how do you like this player?' I always tell them, 'I pay you to give me that information.'
"It doesn't matter what I think because if I tell them who I like, they all like him. Everyone in the room likes him. Ryan has never been that guy.
"And he's never been a guy who says, 'Well, we should have taken this player,' like looking in hindsight. Ryan is the guy who whoever we take, that's our guy and he's 100 percent behind it because we're all in this together."