Before any Gatorade shower, halftime show, or even the opening kickoff, is the pre-game.
In American sports, something that’s a part of every pregame is the national anthem. Some choose to take a knee when it’s played, but Trey Jarnack chooses to stand.
“It was nice being out there because like everybody who wanted to see me stand for the national anthem, they were like ‘you know, you need to show respect to our country and the officer that got shot in Florence. So I was excited to see what happened,” said Jarnack.
At the Carolina Forest football game two weeks ago there was a moment of silence in honor of Florence police sergeant Terrence Carraway. What happened next has now been seen by far more than the crowd at the game.
“Trey is not able to stand on his own, so he asked his mother to pick him up so he could show respect to our nation’s flag and our nation’s national anthem,” Richard Caruso. “And when I saw it, being a marine, I knew the importance of seeing that young man asking to come out of his chair and have his mother hold him, and I took a picture of him and put it on social media.”
As of Thursday evening, a post on Caruso’s Facebook page has over 48,000 likes and 45,000 shares.
“The positive thing about that is it’s all him. You know to have the conversation, ‘oh well mom and dad made him do that,’ it wasn’t like that, he specifically went straight to mom and said ‘hey, I need to stand. I want to show some respect.’ and we were lucky enough Rich was there to take the picture, you know, we didn’t think anything of it at the time, and then it just blew up,” said Scott Janack, Trey’s dad.
Last Friday, Carolina Forest High School officials wanted to create another moment during the national anthem: this one not in the stands, but on the field. Trey stood again for the national anthem but his mom wasn’t there. Holding Trey this time was his little brother.
Trey’s the oldest of three boys. His brother, Adam, is a sophomore and plays corner for the varsity team, and their younger brother, Luke, is starting quarterback for the JV squad.