With the school year in full swing, there is no better way to kick it off than with football season, where the Edina Hornets square up with our neighbors for the state title. But if you end up going to one of these games, I implore you to listen to the stadium instead of simply looking at it. If your hearing is sharp enough, you might recognize the sound of the great craftsmanship of Tim Miller (known onstage as DJ Thrillz), the newest “DJ” for all the Edina games.
Why do I say “DJ” in quotation marks? “There’s a difference between a DJ and a music director,” Miller said. “Because [for] DJing, you’re doing more of actual mixing and transitions and beat matching, and kind of continuous, long songs. In football, we can only do snippets of things, and that’s where a music director comes in.”
A music director, for those who are just learning, is the person who picks out certain sections of songs and chooses when to play them in order to amplify what’s going on in the field. For instance, when it’s the third quarter and there’s a goal in the red zone, they’re the ones that are playing the dramatic music that you hear, which intensifies the experience and gets the crowd pumped up and out of their seats. Miller describes how he came to become a music director. “I started way back in college, when I was DJing school dances, essentially,” he said. “And then after that, I ended up working for a minor league baseball team, and they asked me to be their music director. And that pretty much flipped the switch to going, ‘How can we bring baseball and music to intertwine?’”
So what do students at Edina High School think? “The pregame music was pretty good,” said junior Joshua Furo. “They mostly play like rap stuff, and I’m an athlete myself, so I know that really helps me get ready for a game. The music that the dancers danced to was good as well.”
And yes, the rumors are true: Miller previously worked for the Minnesota Timberwolves as their music director. And no, he hasn’t met Anthony Edwards (I asked), but he did tell me why he started working as the music director for Edina. “We want to bring the college and professional experience to Edina Football. And so we talked about how we can bring that to the games…and hopefully that’ll bring Edina Hornets to state,” he said.
This piece was originally published in Zephyrus’ print edition on September 26, 2024
