On Friday, October 6, Saint Xavier’s student run radio, WXAV, participated in College Radio Day. College Radio Day was first created in 2010 by Dr. Rob Quicke.
Quicke worked with Saint Xavier University’s own Peter Kreten to develop the idea.
“I had the idea back in December of 2010 on the Day of Unity,” Dr. Quicke said, “I watched this film called The Social Network, which is about the founding of Facebook, and how it took off and united people and brought a lot of people together.
“I woke up the next morning with the idea of College Radio Day and the first person I called about that was Pete Kreten at Saint Xavier University. I called Pete up and said, “What do you think about this?” and he said, “This is great we gotta do this.” So we started working on the idea.
“Really, for the first one we didn’t have high expectations at all,” Quicke continued. “We thought if we could get 50 stations to do this we would be happy, and we ended up having over 300 different stations.”
College Radio Day is celebrated across the globe in over 30 different countries. The event highlights the importance of college radio.
WXAV Producer Anthony Lopez says, “College radio gives new musicians an easy way to have a platform while at the same time exposing these new artists to the community.”
The event turned out to be a long day for WXAV. Deputy music director, Eddie kicked the day off at 7:00am with his show, and the final show was at 11:00pm.
WXAV made sure they had all of SXU’s attention when they took some time to broadcast in the diner and give out CD’s.
“It started around 11:00am in the diner,” WXAV Producer, Luke Hodorek, said, “There was a table set up, there were CDs from inventory people were allowed to take, and there was some candy, too. There were some pretty cool people who were there, taking some of the stuff.”
Besides playing songs, the station also had bands in the studio.
This year, WXAV’s guest bands included The Islanders, The Bombards, Mike Dickson, Dead Freddie, and The Thin Cherries. The bands all performed live in studio.
“The Thin Cherries were kind of an alternative rock band,” Hodorek explained, “They were really good, and they were really nice, too.”
Although Programming Director, Mia Morgan, did not have any bands present during her show, she gave listeners a whole hour of show tunes.
“I’ve been wanting to do that since my sophomore year!” Morgan explained, “I finally had built up the library enough to do that. I didn’t even talk, really, maybe two or three times. I had a great time. It was awesome!”
Sean Anderson, WXAV’s Music Director, also had a show during the day.
“I did an hour of only cover songs, so it was all bands just covering other bands from studio albums. It was just something that popped into my head, something different that I’d never done before.
“I got to play some bands I really enjoy, like Cap’n Jazz’s Take on Me which is fantastic and Lorde covering Swinging Party by the Replacements.”
“I think it was the smoothest College Radio Day we’ve had,” Morgan said, giving her input as a perspective on how the day went.
“College Radio Day has united a lot of college radio stations,” Quicke explained, “It brings to people’s attentions the fact that college radio is still here, it’s still kicking, and that rumors of its death are exaggerated. College radio is still important in many people’s lives.”
You can listen to the rest of Quicke’s interview here.
Cheyanne Daniels
News Editor
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