Over the last 100 years, FHS has had tens of thousands of students walk through its halls, each successive class and generation leaving their own mark, defining their own high school memories while shaping future high school experiences at FHS. These stories, traditions, rivalries and chants linger even while buildings get remodeled and mascots evolve.
A key part of FHS’s folklore is our iconic chant, “Fremont, You know!” This chant is shouted during almost every rally and football game, but how did this chant come about, and what does it really mean? According to Jason Townsend, a member of the class of 1990 and current FHS PE teacher and basketball coach, the chant was the brainchild of former principal Peggy Raun-Linde in the early 2000s intended to excite the student body.
“Like Fremont, you know, like an exclamation point type thing,” said Townsend.
For many FHS students, the ambiguity is a point of confusion, almost like an inside joke long forgotten but still repeated.
“After we’d chant it, we’d be like, ‘What do we know?’” Alejandra Flores FHS wellness space support specialist and class of 2014 alumnus said.
This uncertainty, however, might be exactly why the chant has endured. Instead of relying on a literal definition or historical explanation, it functions as a shared reflex. Something that each class inherits, shouts and then passes down — keeping it alive through repetition rather than certainty.
Another longstanding piece of FHS folklore is our rivalry with Homestead High School. While high school rivalries are often dramatized in movies, Fremont’s stems from something much simpler: geography.
“You have this, like, giant concentration of students within two miles of each other, and then their school and their atmosphere is different from our school and culture and all that stuff,” Flores said. “So there’s always going to be that, like, butting heads, rivalry, sibling relationship.”
While this rivalry is often contained to the sidelines, tensions sometimes flare, resulting in pranks like the alleged dumping of 500 pounds of manure into the Homestead pool, becoming part of the school mythology.
“I mean, there’s pranks, but it’s hard to prove that it was us or them.” Townsend said. “It’s usually self-inflicted, like Fremont kids doing stupid stuff in Fremont.”
While FHS’s rivalry and chant remain active, evolving parts of our school’s folklore, others have faded away as the campus and its culture evolve.
“We used to have a varsity club here, where it was varsity athletes, boys only,” Townsend said, “They used to do a bunch of hazing, and that got phased out because you can’t do that stuff anymore.”
While some activities were deliberately phased out, others have simply been lost to time.
“ASB, they would spend a giant portion of the year cutting out these like pink and red hearts for Valentine’s Day,” Flores said. “Everybody got their name on a heart.”
These hearts would then be posted across the campus, as students would run out to find their own hearts.
Over a century, FHS has continuously redefined itself. With new stories constantly being created, old clubs questioned and retired and slogans withstanding the test of time. All becoming part of the ever-expanding FHS folklore.
