About 75 steps away is a two-story brick building. It houses the one DeMatha program that might top them all. And buried beneath it is some of the evidence.
The DeMatha music program, founded by John Mitchell in 1970 in large part to provide a pep band for Morgan Wootten’s renowned basketball team, has won so many awards that the school has run out of room for them. In the 1990s, when construction of what is now the McCarthy Music Center began, Mitchell saw opportunity.
“There was a big hole in the ground, and we thought, ‘Hmmm,’ ” Mitchell said, with humor as dry as a bassoon’s B flat. “So there are a lot of trophies buried under this building. It’s happening again. We have an attic full of trophies here. We don’t have the space to build a trophy case. It’s a great problem to have, but it is a problem.”
Eighteen trophies and plaques, from an April music festival in Atlanta, smothered a table outside his office. He scooted a large box holding more into the faculty restroom. Mitchell, 65, is retiring this year — he will conduct a DeMatha concert for the last time on Thursday — and part of his legacy will be stashes of substantial spoils, to be unearthed by future band directors or archaeologists.
“If we could just melt these things down and get something for them, or if they’d just give us money instead of trophies, it’d be great,” Mitchell said.
DeMatha, with an enrollment of 950 boys in suburban Washington, has built a national reputation largely on athletics. Sports publications take turns bestowing top rankings on DeMatha’s dominating programs. The basketball team under Wootten and, since 2002, under Mike Jones, has produced about 150 college scholarship players and more than a dozen N.B.A. players.
Bill McGregor, the football coach, recently resigned after 29 years, 17 conference championships and an estimated 350 players who went to college on scholarships.
Less attention is showered on the music program, with its unusual link to athletics and its unusual respect in the halls of DeMatha.
Joey Peacock, a 6-foot-3 junior who plays forward on the basketball team and first-chair alto saxophone in the wind ensemble, said: “Everybody will come up to me: ‘Oh, you made the DeMatha basketball varsity team — that’s very impressive. I know that your basketball team is basically the best thing you have.’
“I’ll say: ‘I don’t really think it is the best thing we have. I think the best thing we have is our music program.’ ”
What makes DeMatha most unusual is that students like Peacock are not unusual at all. While high schools everywhere are notorious for their persistent and stereotypical social strata, with athletes often perched near the top and band members near the bottom, DeMatha has largely avoided “those separate empires within the school,” as Daniel McMahon, the principal, said.
It is cool to play sports. It is just as cool to be in the band. It is coolest to do both.
Mitchell started with 19 students in 1970. Now he oversees 400 students, 15 ensembles (but no marching band) and 4 other full-time faculty members. (James Roper, whom Mitchell hired in 1982, will rise to director of bands.) Mitchell estimated that 70 percent of the band members play at least one sport at DeMatha.
Several DeMatha students told stories of middle school friends who stopped playing music because it was not the popular thing to do at their high school.
“They’re totally done with it,” said the senior Shane Denman, who plays lacrosse and bassoon with equal finesse. “I’m the only one in my grade to continue on, that I know of.”
Students acknowledged that it helped that DeMatha was an all-boys school.
“Girls have enormous social power,” McMahon said.
Parents said they were pleasantly surprised by the band’s wide acceptance, particularly at a school so associated with athletics. Bruce K. Hudson had decades-old memories of playing tuba — not at DeMatha — and being egged by the football team. He also remembers visiting DeMatha with his son more than a decade ago, and making small talk with a football player.
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