Nolensville's Little League World Series run special for Nash Carter — with mom cancer-free
SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — Moments before walking toward the mound to pitch the biggest game of his 11-year-old life, Nash Carter stood in the corner of a dugout in Warner Robins, Georgia, hunched over a garbage can.
He was throwing up.
His Nolensville Little League team was preparing to play yet another elimination game at the Southeast Region tournament. Hopes of the program's second consecutive trip to the Little League World Series hung in the balance. A team from Georgia stood in the way.
ESPN cameras were everywhere.
While Carter's head hung over that trash can, Nolensville manager Randy Huth hung out in front of it.
"So the cameras couldn't see him," Huth said. "I didn't want the team to know.
"And he still went out and shoved it on them. Nash is special, man."
Nolensville won 9-3 that day, beat Virginia in the final and then finished fourth at the 2022 Little League World Series.
"It was my first time pitching in front of ESPN and on TV," Carter said earlier this week. "I was so nervous because of the anxiety. I forgot how to pitch. Now I don't have that."
Now he's back at the Little League World Series. Just like last year, he pitched in an elimination game against a team from Georgia at the Southeast Regional. Just like like last year, he won.
Unlike last year, he didn't throw up.
"I'd already been there," he said. "I wasn't as nervous. It was a bigger game than last year."
Nash Carter's mom: A cancer diagnosis
Just like his father's, Nash Carter's flowing hair peeks out unpredictably from under a yellow and dark blue baseball cap.
Nash's mother, Emily, likes to take credit for that because for a while, she didn't have hair.
She was diagnosed in March 2021 with Stage 4 breast cancer. It stole every last one of her once-straight strands of hair.
"I joke with them, I'm like, 'I've inspired all the hair growth in my house,' because I had lost all mine,' " she said.
Emily Carter's hair is back. It's curly now.
A cardiac nurse for Centennial Heart at TriStar Centennial, Emily was working from her family's Franklin home when her right breast began to ache, the first of the dominoes to fall in her path toward learning she had cancer.
"I didn't feel bad," she said. "That's the horrible thing about cancer, is it doesn't make you feel bad until there's a problem."
'I knew she could get through it'
She didn't bother calling her doctor. Instead she scheduled a mammogram, figuring she was due. Her diagnostics were abnormal, so she had an ultrasound. Again abnormal. She talked for two hours with a radiologist, who ordered a biopsy. She hoped against hope it was just a benign tumor.
It wasn't.
She continued to work, to raise her three children as normally as she could. Initially, inside, she was terrified.
Nash noticed.
"It hurt me and my family, but I knew she could get through it," Nash said.
Nash's 9-year-old brother's team at the time, the Franklin Bombers, noticed. The coach started a mantra that spring and summer called "We fight." The team wore pink wristbands to raise breast cancer awareness. Parents from other teams brought meals, picked up the Carter kids for playdates, brought them to and from games.
"At every turn somebody intervened and made something happen," she said. "I was just full of gratitude."
Emily finished her last radiation treatment in February 2022, three months after surgery to remove the cancer.
Then summer 2022 happened. Nash Carter threw up. Nash Carter threw his heart out to help get his team to the Little League World Series.
Like he always had, Mark, a senior associate athletic director at Vanderbilt, coached him.
Emily watched a boy and his father bond over baseball. Watched father introduce son to Dansby Swanson, Nash's favorite player, through his Vanderbilt connections.
Baseball kind of brought her and Mark together, too.
'Baseball does beautiful things'
Mark Carter pitched for Lipscomb University as a freshman. He transferred to Memphis the next year.
Emily was a student there, studying the nursing path that runs deep in her family. The two were introduced by mutual friends who live down the street from the Carters in Franklin.
"If I hadn't transferred, I never would have met her and I wouldn't be doing this," Mark said. "Baseball sort of took me that direction.
"Baseball does beautiful things, right?"
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Mark proposed on his uncle's farm during an Easter egg hunt. He'd hidden Emily's engagement ring inside a plastic egg.
"Made her open it, and when she cracked it open there was a ring," Mark said.
He took a knee and asked her to marry him, which she did on Oct. 30, 2004.
Seven years later, Emily became pregnant with their first child. They loved the name Nash.
"When she got pregnant, we weren't living in Nashville," Mark said.
Within a matter of months, they'd left their jobs at Duke University and moved to Tennessee.
There, baseball continued to do beautiful things, such as take Emily's mind off treatments.
"She said it makes her feel better because she doesn't have to think about how she was sick," Nash said. "It helped a lot."
'She's a rock star'
Emily Carter's phone rang and rang Thursday. Five times. She didn't pick up.
She quickly texted, apologetically.
"I am manning five kids in a pool while another mom ran to grab sandwiches," she wrote from a pool deck at a Hampton Inn in Williamsport.
She's always running around, always the first to offer a hand.
"She's a rock star," Mark said.
She is, like her oldest son, also a bit of an introvert. She keeps her difficulties to herself.
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Huth found out by accident that Emily had cancer. Mark, a new coach on the team, never brought it up.
"Not one time," Huth said. "Ever."
Emily's hair was really short when she first met Huth. He thought nothing of it.
"I was Facebook stalking them. I wanted to know more about them," Huth said of how he found out Emily had cancer. "I was like, 'Oh, God.' "
He confirmed the news with Mark. Last fall, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Emily beating cancer, he painted pink every base on the Nolensville fields he maintains.
"They never quit smiling and they never talk about it," Huth said.
Brotherly love
Nash Carter isn't one to sing along on car rides, save for the one time he did out of sight of his parents, while riding home with a friend.
He's not much for hooting and hollering. He doesn't have a cell phone and never has really bugged his parents for one. He hardly plays video games. He plays basketball.
He loves, loves, loves his 4-year-old sister Killian.
"He just dotes on her," Emily said. "Always wants her to sit on his lap. They have their own handshake, a Nash-Killian handshake. It happened over the summer."
They worked on it until they perfected it.
"He would leave for a game and he's like, 'All right, give me our handshake.' And they would do it."
More high-fives await Nash Carter at the Little League World Series, where he has played ping-pong and air hockey and watched some baseball games.
His dad is there by his side, again.
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His mother and his brother and his sister will watch from the stands at Howard J. Lamade Stadium, again.
The cameras will be there, again.
Nash Carter's nerves, though, won't be there. At least not like they were a year ago.
"After being there, I'm just not thinking about the cameras," he said. "Just think about the game in front of me."
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nolensville 2023 LLWS run special for Nash Carter with mom cancer-free
