Pasco football team gets its own ‘Anthem’

Posted Sep 16, 2010 by Eddie Daniels

Updated Sep 16, 2010 at 02:40 PM

Anyone notice the music playing as the Pasco football team took the field last Friday night? No, it wasn’t anything from Jock Jams or the latest hit on the radio.

This song was homegrown.

A week before facing Plantation American Heritage, Pasco High head coach Tom McHugh approached Pirates receiver Hakeeme Ishmar about creating a song for the team.

“Since he’s a burgeoning rap kind of guy, he likes to put that kind stuff together and he put that together,” McHugh said. “I told him what I’d kind of like it to say and he wrote it.”

Who knows if there was a correlation, but Pasco collected an impressive, 35-20 victory against the Patriots last Friday night.

Ishmar, a senior, who has dabbled in music since he was in eighth grade, needed just an hour and a half to make the song, entitled Pasco Anthem, come to life. The lyrics and the music in the background were all his creation.

“I made it from the sayings we say in practice and mostly I just quoted everything Coach McHugh tells us in practice and just put them into my lyrics,” Ishmar said. “We say, ‘Fire the cannons’ and that’s a saying to get the team rowdy because every time we fire the cannon, that emphasizes that we scored a touchdown.

“We started off the season kind of slow in practice and being lackadaisical and the coaches were saying, do you just want to be the best in the county or the best in the state? I put all our sayings into one big lyric and then I did a chant after all of those just to get the crowd hyped.”

When it’s all said and done, Ishmar wants to pursue a music production career.

“It was delivering a simple message to the crowd that good guys do wear black,” Ishmar said.

Not a bad start.