Marv's Story: Why I Created Roster of Us

Sports have a way of remembering people by their records. Jordan went 6-0 in the Finals, Brady has seven Super Bowl rings, and at this point, I think Simone Biles has won more medals than I can keep track of. What is extremely rare in sports, though, is finding a fan who remembers everyone.

I was lucky enough to know one of those people. Growing up in Greenville, North Carolina, and of course attending the best high school, J.H. Rose, I came to know Marvin Jarman, or Marv, as everyone called him. And when I say everyone, I really do mean everyone. He was a symbol of Rose athletics and, really, the Greenville sports community as a whole.

Saying Marv was a fan of Rose athletics is probably the biggest disservice you could do him. After graduating from Rose in 1969 and, of course, being named Mr. School Spirit, Marv just never really left. For more than half a century, as players graduated, coaches retired, and new generations of students walked through Rose's doors, Marv kept showing up.

Football, basketball, baseball, it didn't really matter. If Rose was playing, there was a good chance Marv was there. In fact, you could probably count on your hands how many games he missed. And when he did miss one, it was usually because two Rose teams unfortunately had to play at the same time.

Marv wasn't just a fan. He was Rose athletics.

Greenville being a baseball town meant Marv devoted a lot of his time to the diamond, in part because of his friendship with longtime Rose baseball coach Ronald Vincent, who everyone just calls RV. But even calling Marv a baseball fan doesn't quite cover it. He was part of the team. Pitch counts, lineups, drills, practices, and plenty of fist bumps were all part of his responsibilities. Year after year, players came and went. Marv stayed.

I was a soccer player, so truthfully, I never had the opportunity to work with Marv one-on-one. But that didn't mean I didn't know him. It was almost impossible not to.

Knowing Marv didn’t necessarily mean that you had regular conversations with him. It was walking past him around Rose, seeing him at a game, or driving past him and wondering, “What’s Marv up to?” We all knew him. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for people to just pull up right beside him and offer him a ride; it was just sort of what you did.

Marv experienced the world a little differently than most people, and anyone who spent time around him could recognize that. There were challenges he faced, but his memory certainly wasn’t one of them.

Marv could tell you rosters, players, and records from just about any team that stepped onto a Rose field or court. You could move away, come back, go bald, or grow a beard, and Marv was still going to know exactly who you were. He was a human encyclopedia for Rose sports.

Plenty of players left over the years Marv spent in the stands, but each and every person was remembered. It wasn’t just because he cared about the game; he truly cared about people. That was what made Marv so special. He wasn’t an untouchable figure who was larger than life; everyone knew Marv, and he knew them right back.

When Marv passed away in 2024, J.H. Rose High School lost someone who meant everything to us. At the time, I was working with our school newspaper and was part of the team that put together a special memorial edition about Marv to hand out at his service, which was held inside the school. We printed more copies than we had for anything else I worked on with the paper.

I think that was when I started to understand just how far Marv's impact actually reached. It is one thing to know that someone is loved, but it is another to see an entire community come together because that person is gone. Former players, coaches, classmates, friends, and people who simply knew Marv from around Greenville showed up for one man. Different generations of people who may have had very little else in common all had some connection.

Working on that edition also made me think differently about the stories we choose to tell in sports. As far as I know, Marv never scored a touchdown for Rose, hit a home run, or had his name at the top of a stat sheet.

But you can’t tell the story of Greenville sports without Marv.

That idea stuck with me for a while, from high school all the way to college. The more I’ve learned about storytelling and sports media, the more I’ve thought about how many people like Marv never get their stories told. We spend so much time documenting the people who win championships and break records that it can be easy to forget about everyone else who makes sports matter in the first place.

I created Roster of Us to make a space to share stories like this. Too often in sports, stories that don’t make the front page simply vanish. The players, coaches, fans, and icons like Marv matter, no matter what league, team, or sport they are a part of.

Whether it is a story about injury, mental health, community, or something else, we all have a story to tell.