Jim Carr was driving south on the New Jersey Turnpike to a recruiting stop on Thursday afternoon.

In an ideal world, the Rhode Island assistant would be back home with his wife, Natalie, and daughter, Lucia, the same evening, unwinding after another day on the college basketball hamster wheel.

Except Carr’s world hasn’t been ideal in three years, not since his son, Brayden, died at the age of 2½.

So instead of heading back to Rhode Island on Thursday evening, Carr planned to double back up the Turnpike, fetch a head coach at Newark airport, and spend the night in New Jersey.

By 9 a.m. on Friday, he would be at Fairleigh Dickinson University, leading the fourth annual Brayden Carr Foundation Coaches Clinic.

"I would rather be doing anything else in the world tomorrow," Carr said. "When you lose a child, you never have a perfect day again. Something always brings you back. But for one day, we’re trying to make this thing the most special day."

Even through the haze of their own devastation, the Carrs realized how fortunate they had been. They didn’t have to worry about what to them were little expenses -- things like hotel rooms near the hospitals while Brayden, who suffered from epileptic seizures, was sick -- but understood that others did.

And so just five months after Brayden died, the Carrs started the foundation, turning to the same coaching community that had buoyed the family throughout their ordeal, for help.

Carr didn’t have big plans that first year. He frankly had no clue how much money he might raise. But with an A-list of speakers (including Bill Self, Bob Hurley and John Calipari) -- all of whom insisted on paying their own expenses so the proceeds all went to the foundation -- he raised $100,000.

"Then we got more and more requests for help through the foundation," Carr said. "So we kept going."

This year, Rick Pitino, Jay Wright, Fred Hoiberg, Mike Brey, Frank Martin and George Karl will be the speakers. Countless other coaches send members of their staff to work the clinic.

"I was out recruiting this year and someone said to me, 'Jim Carr? Are you Brayden Carr's father? I just watched the clinic tapes," Carr said. "Something simple like that, to keep his name alive and to associate him with something so important, that makes it all worth it."