Lizzie Carr, right, with teammates at Grounded All Day Cafe in Lexington Sunday. (Joni Fowler/W1974 Collective Photo)
Molly Berezowitz had 213 digs at Marquette last season, including a career-high 21 digs in a NCAA Tournament win at Utah in the NCAA Tournament. However, she opted to transfer to Kentucky where her sister Maddie played and was on UK’s 2020 national championship team.
Berezowitz is adjusting to playing for coach Craig Skinner with new teammates but already is fully immersed in making herself a part of the community thanks in large part to The W1974 Collective and the work it does to promote female student-athletes at Kentucky.
Sunday she was at Grounded All Day Cafe in Lexington with several other UK volleyball players to meet and greet fans of all ages. There were games and also the opportunity to make vision boards — a collage of images that represent goals and dreams.
“I’ve never had the opportunity to work with a collective like this, and it’s super cool to have opportunities just to work with community members and little girls,” Berezowitz said. “The little girls look to us as role models, so it’s super cool for them just to meet up with us and get to have conversations with us , ask us questions and really just interact with younger people or even adults for that matter.”
The UK volleyball player was on WLAP Sunday Morning Sports Talk before the outing and said she was “stoked” to make her own vision board, which was one of her New Year’s resolutions.
“Then life just gets crazy. I decided to enter the transfer portal,” Berezowitz said. “So I’m excited to have a vision board for the rest of the spring and the summer and just work with these people.”
Teammate Lizzie Carr, a Purdue transfer, was with her for the radio show and appearance with The W1974 Collective. She already had her first encounter with UK fans after the volleyball team’s recent intrasquad scrimmage. It was open to the public and after the match over 350 fans lined up for pictures and autographs from the players.
“At Purdue we would get our fans to come and we would have little girls and some people lined up for autographs and pictures. We would do some signing periods, kind of like we did (after the intrasquad scrimmage),” Carr said.
“But for an intrasquad scrimmage, I’ve never seen anything like that before. The weather wasn’t really great,and I was just so impressed that there were still that many people there ready to cheer us on and meet us after the game and just kind of hang out with us a little bit. It was really cool just to see that we have so much support behind us.”
She got another dose of BBN reality while in Indianapolis Saturday for an exhibition match against Illinois.
“We were in Indianapolis and there were tons of fans who came up to me who were from Lexington,” Carr said. “I was like, and you’re here in Indianapolis right now just for like a scrimmage in the middle of the day on a Saturday. It’s just really cool to see how committed the fans are and how much they want to see us.
“It makes our job really fun because you know we were those little girls once. It’s really cool to be on the other side of it and now be the ones that they’re looking up to versus us being the ones looking up to other people playing.”
Carr said there was nothing like The W1974 Collective at Purdue to help promote female student-athletes.
“This is really cool because it just really throws you into the community and being a role model and there’s so many different things you can do. You can hang out and do things with kids,” Carr said. “You can read to them, you can do a bunch of different things like that.
“We’re gonna be doing some volleyball clinics and some other stuff. You’re always going to be reaching a different group of people in the community because you’re not just doing the same thing over and over again, so it will always be fun.”
