A new sound for Paladins football

Gary Sabak stood on the Paramus Catholic football field, speechless.

There were tears in his eyes. He had just watched Paramus Catholic High School's marching band perform its first successful halftime show.

The circumstances - whom the Paladins played, whether they won, when exactly it happened - escape him now (For the record, they were playing St. Joseph's Regional Sept. 25, and they lost). But he can recall exactly how his nascent marching band performed.

"It was completely amazing," he said. "There was very little wrong, actually, which surprised me because I was really prepared for the worst."

It's not that the new marching band director didn't believe his students could do it. But fielding a marching band is not only a first for Paramus Catholic - it's a rarity among all the Catholic schools in the state.

Because of the size of most Catholic schools, they don't have the bodies to field a marching band. And private schools don't have the edge public schools do of having students in the same music program from elementary school up.

But with 1,500 students, Paramus Catholic is larger than most other parochial schools, and Sabak, a music teacher, already has experience starting a program from scratch. When he started at the school in 2005, he had a concert band of five students.

Today it has 54 members. 

Sabak hopes the marching band, whose current membership is 16 students, undergoes the same exponential growth.

"I would love to see my next year [at] 40 [members], and then from there on, I would love to be in the 80 to 100 range," he said.

There has been talk of starting a marching band since Sabak arrived at the school. Last spring, the clamoring from students and parents reached a tipping point, and Sabak decided to measure exactly how much interest there was.

He sent a letter to the parents of incoming freshmen who were joining concert band and invited them to a meeting about starting a marching band. From that meeting he found his 16 recruits, who would be led by the band's drum major, junior Tim Malone.

The  marching band is a long-held dream for Malone as well. He has been in Sabak's ear about starting a marching band since his freshman year.

Malone's home district is Mahwah, which sports a strong music program, and the aspiring music teacher hopes the Paramus Catholic program can be as successful. 

"I can definitely see the marching band in the next couple of years getting over 100 people," he said.

Malone and his fellow band members have already started recruiting, putting posters up in the Garden State Plaza. After midterms, the band will hold performances in Catholic grammar schools in the area.

For junior glockenspiel player Gabriel Redmond, the hope is that he and the rest of the band will have a lasting legacy at the school.

"If it's a huge band [in the future]," he said, "I'm going to be able to say to my kids, 'I was in the first marching band at Paramus Catholic.'"