At 5:15 in the evening of January 31, 1988, hundreds of Deerfield boys spilled out of the campus dining hall after Headmaster Robert E. Kaufmann stood in front of the student body and announced that Deerfield Academy would be admitting girls the following year (New York Times). For a while, the boys worried school spirit would be lost as the Academy became coed. But even before Deerfield introduced co-education, school spirit has been an integral part of student culture through DA chants and songs. Today, alumni and community members across campus illustrate how school spirit continues to be an integral part of the school culture. However, how did earlier school spirit affect students’ day to day lives, and how has it changed, continued, and progressed over time?
In the ’80s, Deerfield chants and cheers were prominent and highly integrated into the school’s culture. One was simply, “01342 Hey!,” the Academy zip code. Another was the switchboard number “4-1-3-7-7- 2-0-2-4-1!” Students heard these numbers regularly, as all calls to the school had to travel through the switchboard receptionist. Alumni John Knight ’83 jokingly described the cheer, “Our enthusiasm was high but our creativity was low back then.”
Aga-chi, a current and widely popular cheer at the academy, has had different versions over the years. It was known as “Acka-lacka-chi, Acka-lacka-cha” to Math Teacher Marc Dancer ’79, while former student Josh Binswanger ’80 remembered it as “Aka lakka ching, Aka lakka chow.” Despite the changes, students continue to chant the traditional school cry at athletic events, school meetings, Sunday sit-downs as well as pass the cheer down down to new freshmen.
As it is today, Deerfield and Choate rivaled fervently, and the cheers that accompanied their competitions were no different. Mr. Scandling recalled the banners students would put up to tease Choate as controversial, suggestive, and “innuendofilled”. Alumni B. C. Knowlton ’80 described the anti-Choate cheering culture before Deerfield began accepting girls, saying that students would chant, “Choate has girls but they still can’t score!” as Deerfield’s rival went coed significantly earlier. They would also tease the Choate students with, “Knit one, Pearl two; Choaties, yoo-hoo,” Josh Binswanger ’80 added, the last part in a high pitched voice to reference the antiquated tradition of teaching female students to “knit and pearl” in home economic classes, while boys took shop and learned different skills expected of their gender.
When Deerfield started admitting girls, the community began to fear the death of the academy’s school spirit. Mr. Scandling described the dread that many students carried following 1988: “[I]t seemed like …‘our school spirit is dying, our school spirit is dying.’” Much of this was due to the coed transformation. Chief Advancement Officer Chuck Ramsay ’88 added, “[T]he boys were protesting because they felt like, with girls on campus, the school spirit would disappear because boys would be afraid of… cheering not being cool.”
The newly coed community reacted by emphasizing school spirit more than ever. New cheers rose up along with the mixed-gender movement, and past chants that teased Choate for being “girl-y” faded while the Deerfield cheerleaders began incorporating girls. One significant change was the nomination of girls as Captain Deerfield, the head cheerleader. “We’ve had really strong school leaders who were girls before, but that idea of who’s in charge of school spirit seemed for a long time to be kind of a male role. You know, a lot of that has changed through the years,” History Teacher Conrad Pitcher mentioned.
Today, many Deerfield songs are carried on from the ’80s and ’90s. While some lost popularity, others adapted to a changing student body. “The Sons of Deerfield” song was commonly sung during Frank Boyden’s time and through the ’80s, but as the school underwent its coed transformation, the song was rarely sung again. The Cheering Song starts off every school meeting and adapted pronouns to be inclusive of a coed community and is still prominent today.
The Evensong, which is sung after sit down dinners on Sundays today, was sung at a family and school wide spring concert known as the ‘Spring Sing’ in the ’80s. Students used to rehearse the Evensong and the Deerfield Song—which is not sung or known widely today—after meals during the spring term. Eventually, the Deerfield Song faded with the end of Spring Sing.
But the end of this spring concert didn’t signify the end of longstanding tradition. As Mr. Pitcher explained, “[Singing the Evensong on Sundays is] something that’s been new, and it’s actually trying to tap into an older tradition…when Frank Boyden was here…they would have Sunday meetings where they would sing songs and gather, and so the decision to…go back to singing the Evensong every Sunday [is] sort of a nod to that older tradition.”
“Deerfield used to be a true singing school,” Mr. Dancer described, with music being an integral part of the school’s community. Although Deerfield has pared down on required singing traditions, such as the Spring Sing, students continue to sing and shout the Evensong, the Cheering Song, and many longEvensong-Sheet-Music-nd2standing cheers across the courts, in the fields, and on the stage. As Mr. Pitcher put it, “[A]t Deerfield, [songs are] really still part of the fabric of who we are as a school.”