Silent supporter

GREENVILLE - It’s easy to spot Jerry Jarvis at Riverheads High School football games. He’s always at the end of the top row of the old red and rickety wooden bleachers.

Just as easy: noticing facilities improvements like freshly painted goal posts and newly erected bleachers, and the gleaming equipment worn by athletes across all sports.

But to tie the soft-spoken Jarvis to those projects would require following the Middlebrook man late into the night, then waking early to catch him with a paintbrush in hand as the sun rises.

“I’m not sure when he ever rests,” said Riverheads Boosters President David Clymore. “He does a lot of things behind the scenes that nobody knows he does.”

“Most people probably don’t even realize he’s there,” Athletic Director Matt Stevens said. “He’s quiet.”

“If you’re in it for the recognition, you’re in it for the wrong reason,” Jarvis said.

Jarvis, a 1969 Riverheads grad, is perhaps the most active supporter of the school’s athletics and the most dedicated game attendee, school officials said. He also volunteers for the Middlebrook Ruritan Club and Fire Department and American Cancer Society. He has worked decades at Nibco, a metal fittings plant in Stuarts Draft.

“When we have a project, Jerry is in the middle of it,” Clymore said. “I guess what’s remarkable is, Jerry’s kids are older. He has no ties to Riverheads High School ... I wish we had 10 more people like that.”

When the concession stand’s ventilation motor broke down, Jarvis volunteered to fix it, Clymore said.

“He literally told me he went home and laid down and couldn’t get to sleep because of that motor,” he said. “He was just stressing. Jerry got up at 1 o’clock in the morning and tore it apart, fixed it and brought it back to me the next day.”

‘Turns the wheel’

Before the first kickoff of the football season, Jarvis and Ruritan club members hustled to repaint the goal posts and finish interior work on the stadium’s press box.

Friends Lew Manhart and Joe Vecchioli knew how to mix praise with a good ribbing.

They joked about how long Jarvis takes to run errands amid tiring projects, then the next minute praised him for being the man who “turns the wheel to start with.”

“Jerry says, ‘I need help,’ and I show up,” Vecchioli said.

Jarvis said he noticed some poor equipment and facilities in 2000, which spurred him into action. He has since hosted golf, barbecue and fire wood fundraisers.

“If it’s one thing I can do to make it a little better for [players], that’s what it’s all about,” Jarvis.

A high school football and track athlete himself, Jarvis eventually suffered a shoulder injury.

He also went out for the junior varsity basketball team.

“But that wasn’t it,” he said.

One of Jarvis’ two sons played at Riverheads, but after they graduated, he stayed in tune.

“I can’t tell you the last time he missed a game,” athletic director Stevens said.

His dedication includes traveling with teams. He once tripped 90 miles south with the girls’ basketball team when they played at William Campbell High School in Naruna, south of Lynchburg. When supporters stopped for a meal on the way down, Jarvis pulled in alongside, unannounced.

“We had probably 20 fans there and Jerry was one of them,” Clymore said.

At home events, Jarvis usually camps in the backrow corner.

Of all the plays he’s seen, Jarvis calls Lyndon Humphries’ slam dunk last year against Central-Woodstock High School his favorite Riverheads moment and “probably in high school basketball, the best dunk that’s ever been made.”

“That was just picture perfect,” he said.

‘First-class’

Stevens says Jarvis’s fundraising ideas are always worth hearing.

And to add to his own work ethic, Jarvis knows how to bring more volunteers on board.

“If Jerry has an idea, they know it’s a good one,” Stevens said. “If he says he’s going to do something, it gets done and it gets done in a first-class manner.”

It’s all “yes sir,” and “no sir,” with Jarvis, who despite his modesty has “won about every” award Riverheads can offer, Stevens said.

“He probably deserves a couple more,” he said.

Talk like that is more than Jarvis cares to think about.

His goal is simple and often incremental: make each moment — whether for players, firefighters or those battling cancer — just a little bit more comfortable. That means one project at a time and one project after another.

“I like the kids. That’s what it’s all about,” he said. “A lot of them don’t ever know my name.”