If you’ve ever been to one of DePaul College Prep’s pep rallies, you have heard the DePaul Prep fight song. It begins with students singing, “Root, root, root for DePaul.” It goes into the second and third parts showcasing DePaul Prep’s mission, and then it ends with “D-E-P-A-U-L, let’s go Rams!” The fight song is regarded as a pillar of DePaul Prep athletics. It is first taught to students at Freshman Orientation and is sung after every sporting event, but many students are unaware of its creation and history. So, where did this song come from?
As it turns out, it was only created three years ago during the summer of 2022 by Patrick Rocks, Band Director at DePaul Prep. Rocks explained that when he was being interviewed for the job that summer, there was a fervent interest in creating a new fight song to replace the original DePaul Prep fight song.
While Rocks has not been at DePaul Prep long enough to hear the old fight song, jazz and choir director Jonathan Braun has been here since 2016. He had the job of teaching students the old fight song. The old fight song was actually created before Braun’s start at DePaul Prep, and it had been written in a peculiar way. According to Braun, the old fight song was “kind of wordy.” It was “easy to play, hard to sing,” which also means it was hard to teach students how to properly sing it, and many students don’t like to publicly sing.
The old fight song had verses, which is uncommon for school fight songs. It was Braun’s experience that students at DePaul College Prep did not like the fight song because of these challenges. Michael Rabideau, one of the deans at DePaul Prep, said that “no one really got behind the old fight song].”
The first classes to learn the original DePaul Prep fight song had started at Gordon Tech, and they had gotten used to Gordon Tech’s fights song, which Braun described as a chant. Braun said the students struggled with this change “from this cool chant to a wordy, tricky to sing new thing.” It didn’t “land”as intended.
Rocks said that the student government had a large role in completing this new song. For example, in one meeting the students changed a part of the song. That part being “Alma mater true, will win for you.” According to Rocks, it was changed to “we will do what must be done, till the victory is won.” The same cadence as the old DePaul Prep song was kept.
Rocks then used familiar melodies of fight songs to create this new one that was much easier to sing. Julian Guerrero, one of the senior band members, described his experience learning the song. Before his sophomore year, in his experience, the fight song “was pretty easy to learn.” Yet Guerrero explained that he plays bass, so it could be another experience for other instruments. Geurrero went on to explain that the song had a “kind of up-tempo, rock, spirit.” A hefty change from the slow, low registering old fight song.
To learn the song, Geurero explained that it only took a few classes for the then-smaller band to learn. It became DePaul Prep’s current fight song in the 2022-2023 school year. Junior Noah Morgan explained that when Mr. Mahoney was teaching the fight song, many of the class of 2026, then freshman, “it was very awkward, I, and everyone else didn’t want to do it.” He said the orientation felt “very alienating.” Rocks felt as though students teaching students alleviated some of that awkwardness.
Rocks explained that the song was made to be “something the band could play, that our choir can sing.” In these years since its creation, the fight song has been in students’ heads. It was meant to be easy to sing and easy to get the message across of what DePaul Prep stands for. Rocks then explained that the song has “grown in familiarity and is part of what we are now.” He said that students teaching students has a bigger impact than teachers teaching the fight song.
