Dick Vitale Gala honors Julia Mounts and Chad Carr

SARASOTA -- The words hit Tammi Carr like a ton of bricks, but the worst was yet to come.

"The doctor told me my son Chad had brain cancer. You get ready to fight and they tell you it's a cancer where there is nothing they can do," she recalled. "It just takes the wind right out of you. It's like getting hit in the gut. It is horrible."

Greg Mounts knows the feeling.

His daughter Julia would be a dream come true for any parent. She was a musical prodigy. The Sarasota resident began playing the violin at 3, and by age 9 she had a played solo concerts in Europe and had won an award to solo with the Sarasota Orchestra. She also sang in the choir at St. Barbara Greek Orthodox Church.

Julia Mounts and Chad Carr never got to fulfill their dreams. Their lives were cut

short because of cancer and now their memories are working to give other children a chance they were denied.

They will be honored posthumously Friday night as celebrities from the sports world descend upon the area for the 11th annual Dick Vitale Gala to raise money for pediatric cancer research.

Julia was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer (osteosarcoma) in March 2015 and died March 23 of this year at 13 after a spirited battle with bone cancer. She also played the piano, was an accomplished ballerina and spoke four languages. She was the type of person you read about only in books.

"Not only did she have talent, but had a wonderful personality. Everybody liked her. She found happiness and joy in everything that she did," said her father, Greg Mounts.

Tammi Carr will never forget the day she was told by the doctors that her 3-year-old son Chad had an inoperable brain tumor called Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). He died in November 2015.

Research grants for pediatric cancer research for $200,000 will be given out at the Dick Vitale Gala.

You just don't know when something like this can hit, Greg Mounts said.

"Julia was involved in very intensive ballet training and nobody thinks anything of it when you have an ankle sprain in ballet class," he said. "She rested and it was OK and went back to ballet. It came back a couple of months later. Then it started getting worse again in March, and we had an X-ray taken.

"It's very hard to catch it early, perhaps if we somehow imagined there was something more serious than a sprained ankle we might have caught it earlier and had more options," he said.

Greg and his wife, Irina, did their own research after the initial diagnosis. He said they learned a lot, some of it encouraging and some of it frustrating. They learned that pediatric cancer is very difficult to treat and research is way underfunded.

"One reason that it's very hard to cure is because the growth factors in children make it far more difficult than in adults," Greg Mounts said. "As the child is growing and hormones are creating all the impetus for growth spurts, that same information is going to the cancer cells. Pediatric cancer does not get hardly any funding in available research money. From our experience, I learned sometimes doctors who are treating pediatric cancer and are pediatric oncologists are not aware of the latest research."

He hopes to expand on the grants that will be awarded and spread the knowledge that was found during his research.

"We are trying to get more funding. We are trying to help other people who are in the same situation as us. We want to try and use information we developed over the past year and somehow communicate that," Mounts said.

He said he came across several promising studies including one that might provide a cure for the type of cancer his daughter developed, but it was discontinued by the drug company that was funding it.

"The company just had a change of plans and so promising research like that is just sitting in the gutter essentially and nothing is being done," he said.

A life cut short

Chad Carr was too young to realize the ramifications that his life will have on others, but it doesn't diminish his impact on the University of Michigan football program and people all over the country who learned about his story.

The grandson of former Michigan head football coach Lloyd Carr, Chad seemed to bring everyone in Ann Arbor, Mich., together in his tragically shortened life.

"Rarely do you have any preparation for this," Carr said. "The beautiful thing is that we had incredible support from so many different places in this country. It enabled us as a family to deal with it in a way that we couldn't had we not had the support thing."

"There is nothing worse than getting that diagnosis," Tammi Carr said of the day she learned of her son't inoperable brain tumor. "We thought he had a broken nose. Then they did an MRI, which lasted an hour longer and it started my nervous mother syndrome."

The family created the ChadTough Foundation, whose mission is to raise money to fight DIPG. Dick Vitale met Tammi Carr at a Michigan basketball game and told her he wanted to honor Chad at this year's gala by awarding a research grant in his name.

"Little to no progress has been made since (the astronaut) Neil Armstrong's daughter died of it 50 years ago. Basically, there is a zero percent survival rate," Tammi Carr said. "We have committed ourselves to do everything possible to help make a change and put some focus on the disease. We are grateful that Dick and the V Foundation have seen a need here and have chosen to honor Chad."

Alan Dell, Herald sports columnist/writer, can be reached at 941-745-7056. Follow him on Twitter @ADellSports

This story was originally published May 12, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Dick Vitale Gala honors Julia Mounts and Chad Carr ."