Former Temple football player Jarred Alwan remembered for his smiling humanity

It almost felt like a football crowd, cars directed toward distant spots in outer parking lots. This was all just bigger than a football game. The crowd gathered last Saturday morning inside the massive Solid Rock Baptist Church on White Horse Pike in Berlin, N.J., filling so many pews to celebrate a big life.

Many in attendance had dressed with a touch of orange, Jarred Alwan’s favorite color. They mourned a life that ended last month at age 29. They remembered a Temple linebacker from South Jersey who was a big part of some great Owls teams. Former Winslow Eagles and Camden Catholic High players tried to keep it together and nodded heads vigorously as speakers remembered special moments. A former Owls player now in the NFL read from scripture.

The family had trouble finding a suit to bury him in. He’d had a bunch of nice ones when he played at Temple, his mother said, but he gave them all away to the younger players when he graduated. Typical Jarred, his family members all said.

Alwan’s family doesn’t want to talk about the circumstances of Jarred’s sudden death. Frankly, they don’t owe anyone that. They’re searching for answers themselves, and have donated Alwan’s brain to the Boston University Brain Bank, “the largest tissue repository in the world focused on traumatic brain injury (TBI) and CTE.”

Their question, which is unlikely to ever receive a complete answer. … Did a concussion on a football field contribute to Jarred’s death almost a decade later?

Sitting in their living room in Cherry Hill the day before the funeral service, Alwan’s mother and father and oldest brother and his sister and his girlfriend and his aunt talked about that a bit. Most of all, they talked about Jarred. He was there in the room. Not in some mystical sense. If his family couldn’t literally bring him back, they came as close as they could. There were a couple of tears, mostly laughs.

They talked about how Jarred was humble about football, even when he started as a freshman at Temple. He never told his family that he called the plays on the field in a big win against Navy. (They can picture Jarred as a little guy, getting his teammates into their right spots, then running to his own position.)

He would trash talk all night, however, about his skill at video games, Monopoly — long or speed version — or anything else they came up with on those frequent family game nights. They talked of how Jarred could sit for eight hours with his girlfriend Emily starting and finishing a puzzle. How he loved fishing with his dad, at ponds they were allowed or maybe not allowed to be at. The girls’ softball team he loved coaching down in Texas. Acting as grillmaster on summer nights.

One thing he wasn’t good at, they all said: Lying.

“He’d throw himself under the bus first,” his girlfriend Emily said.

Those nicknames. Noodle? That was an old one.

“He always walked around naked,” said his mother, Narci. “There was his noodle.”

His greatest strength?

“He didn’t exclude anyone,” his mother said. “Everybody’s included.”

Even as a little guy. Another little guy in Winslow Township, a 4-year-old, was running through babysitters so fast that his nickname was “Monster.”

“I’ll babysit him,” Jarred told the adults.

Jarred was 5 at the time. He and Monster stayed friends into adulthood.

At Temple, his mother said, Jarred saw some of the walk-ons didn’t have a place to live right away.

“Jarred let them come sleep on his floor,” his mother said. “They didn’t have the meal card. Jarred fed ‘em.”

“He would always have a full apartment, full of football players, but full of friends he met from classes,” said his friend Troi Barnes. “The common story, making sure that no one was left out. Making sure that everybody felt excited and included.”

To their thinking, donating to the CTE study fell in line with all this. Maybe this can help somebody else.

“He played since he was 5,” his mother said on the issue of concussions. “He never complained about anything.”

They never heard about him having a concussion, until his sophomore year at Temple. “It was in Texas,” his mother said. Temple played a game in Houston that season.

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She wishes he hadn’t gone on the plane to come home. That still gnaws at her.

The concussion symptoms lingered, “for months and months,” his mother said.

“He could hear everybody, but he felt like he was always standing back watching,” she said. “He was there but he wasn’t. Like a fog.”

It lingered.

“For a long time,” Narci Alwan said.

She wanted him to redshirt, she says now.

“I told him, ‘Jarred, you don’t have to play if you don’t want to.’ ... ‘I want to play, I want to play.’ "

From his obituary: Jarred obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Adult and Organizational Development from Temple University in 2016, and earned a Master’s degree in Sports Management in 2019 from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he served as an assistant defensive line coach.

Upon graduating from Baylor, Jarred started his career at Arlington Independent School District in Arlington, Texas, as a physical education teacher, and football and softball coach. Most recently, he was the director of the before and after care program at James A. Garfield School in Collingswood, N.J.

His mother thought she noticed some slight trembles when he came back home in the last couple of years. His sister didn’t see it. His girlfriend said, “A little bit, sometimes.”

“If you’re still having issues, say something to the doctor,” his mother remembers saying, “‘No, I’m fine, I’m fine.’ That was Jarred’s line, ‘I’m fine.’ "

His personality didn’t really change, his mother said. But when he died, the BU CTE study was brought up.

“I reached out,” said Jarred’s sister Lauren. “I was doing some research. I actually was talking to one of our cousins about it, just trying to wrap our heads around why it happened. One of our cousins mentioned that you have to act fast because you have to preserve the organs. So I did research. A couple of my aunts helped me with it. I reached out to Boston University, to their office. She sent me the paperwork with their procedures, helped me find a funeral home that would allow the procedure. We just went from there.”

An easy or hard conversation within the family?

“It was the right thing to do,” said Alwan’s father, Gamal. “It wasn’t that hard of a call.”

“I feel like we were all on the same page,” his sister said.

“Anything we can do to help anybody – that’s just how we are,” his mother said.

In 2015, Temple beat Penn State and almost took out Notre Dame and reached the American Athletic Conference title game against Houston. The day before that game, I’d written a column about the top moments of that special season.

My top choice had been when the Owls had pulled ahead of Notre Dame late. As a moment, that was something else, even if the Irish won in the end.

No. 2 could have easily been No. 1, maybe should have been on top. I wrote: “Pick a sack, any sack. Temple had 10 of them against Penn State, taking out the Nittany Lions for the first time since 1941, landing this 2015 season on foreign soil. We’ll pick the first sack as the biggest one. Penn State was up by 10-0 after two drives — no apparent sign of trouble — when Owls linebacker Jarred Alwan sacked Christian Hackenberg on the first play of the third drive. The Nits went three and out. They never scored again. The sacks kept coming.”

Matt Rhule, who coached Alwan at Temple, also offered him a spot as a graduate assistant at Baylor and said Alwan was terrific — “When I think of him, I think of his smile and his infectious personality ... just a kind-hearted gentle person” who also could explain to the players what these new coaches from Temple were looking for. “He really eased that transition,” Rhule said in a phone interview.

Rhule, now Nebraska’s coach, said Alwan was very clear that he didn’t want to be a major college football coach, that coaching high school football was more his game plan.

As for seeing any signs of CTE, Rhule said, “Nothing. He just did an excellent job working with our players.”

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The program handed out at the service told of a mother whose heart will forever be missing a beat, a father who will never be the same. Poignant remembrances from his siblings, Gamal Jr., Brandon, and Lauren.

At the service, there were songs and readings, from the Bible and poetry. There were memories spoken, each speaker asked to somehow keep it to two minutes. An uncle spoke of Jarred’s “spirit of kindness.” A godbrother mentioned, “I’m pretty sure Jarred made everyone in this room smile at least once.” A godsister said, “Thank you for being my protector,” and “for making my stomach hurt from laughter.” She added how Jarred checked out her new apartment, “and stayed for a year. ‘What’s for dinner?’ "

His girlfriend found the strength to offer some memories of all the laughs and smiles, cooking and “spending entirely too much time walking around Costco.” His buddy Tim DiGiorgio from Temple’s football team said, “I couldn’t call him anything but my brother,” relating how they were such a dominant spades team — “We were definitely the undisputed, undefeated heavyweight champions of the world” — so good that there was “a long list of people” who accused them of cheating, using signals.

“When he entered a room,” DiGiorgio said, “the room was full of life.”

The Rev. Irving Fryar, who knew his way around a football field as well as anybody in South Jersey, gave the eulogy.

“Jarred and I had a couple of things in common,” said Fryar, the former Nebraska All-American and Eagles receiver, a five-time Pro Bowler out of Rancocas Valley High. “Football … and I like cookies. So football and cookies.”

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Fryar offered the Gospel and related it to Jarred Alwan, and the awesomeness of the grace of God.

“He’s in the presence of God, with his new body, his glorified body,” Fryar said.

Gil Brooks, who had coached Alwan as a freshman at St. Joseph’s Prep and for three years at Camden Catholic, spoke of seeing Jarred play for the first time, how they were at an eighth-grade all-star game to see another player, and had brought along a Prep “wooly” hat to give the other player. The other kid never got that hat after they saw Jarred do his thing.

Brooks mentioned a state playoff game, the first time, he said, that Camden Catholic ever beat a team from North Jersey in the playoffs. That team, Pope John XXIII, had Noah Brown, a wide receiver who went on to Ohio State and still plays for the Dallas Cowboys. The goal was to keep the ball away from Brown.

“Jarred ran the ball 43 times that day,” Brooks said.

The coach related that as preamble, noting how much effort Alwan put into merely commuting to the schools from Winslow Township, how his football prowess got everyone’s attention but turned out to be so secondary.

“It’s the smile,” Brooks said to his fellow mourners celebrating this rich but too short life. “The beautiful smile.”