Music has a way of touching a person’s every emotion. A song can uplift a person or make them cry.
It also has a way of keeping the fans entertained during a sporting event. During a spring day at either a Middle Tennessee State University baseball or softball game, music plays a big role in getting the players ready for the contest.
Every Blue Raider player picks a song that’s played when they come up to bat or when a pitcher enters the mound. The type of music selected covers all the bases.
“The song shows a little bit of our personality to the fans and who we are,” baseball outfielder Nathan Hines said.
The senior chose the song “Shipping Off to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphies as his music. It may be recognized from the 2006 Oscar award-winning movie “The Departed.”
“I love bagpipes, and when I first heard the song it stuck with me,” Hines said.
For softball freshman catcher Natalie Ysais, she chose a song that brings her back home: 2Pac’s hip-hop hit from 1996, “California Love.”
“I like the beat to it, so when I come up to bat it kind of has that bounce going,” the Riverside, Calif., native said.
Thirteen years ago, the song was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 list for two weeks.
On the other side of the coin, sophomore catcher Laurie Anne Cooley chose country artist Jason Aldean’s song “She’s Country.”
“It just really suits me,” Cooley said. “That’s the kind of music I like, and that’s what I listen to before games.”
Last November, Aldean performed in Murfreesboro, but Cooley, a Covington, Tenn., native, said she could not attend the concert because she had homework that night.
MTSU public address announcers David Limbaugh and Jeff Shipley put all the songs on a computer program called Sports Sound Pro. Before the season starts each player selects his or her song. The song is then put on a program called Audio Grabber that edits the language and content. Then the music is sent to another program that sets the level and range of the song. They also grab sound bytes from movies and other sounds to play during breaks in the action.
The softball program includes over 4,000 songs and sound bytes, while baseball has over 54,000.
One of the players chose MTSU because of the baseball and music programs.
Sophomore Marshall Mears is a recording industry major and hopes to get into mixing and editing production for bands.
He says he wants to open a studio in the distant future.
“I’ve loved music all my life,” Mears said. “My dad was a musician. I always listen to his garage bands growing up. So I started to learn how to play instruments. I started off with drums, then I switched over to guitar. I started to write stuff and I wanted to figure out how to get it on a CD, just playing back to myself. So I started learning about recording software. I really got interested. By junior and senior year in high school, I kind of wanted to do this for a living.”
Mears’ choice of music is metal band Trivium and the song “Torn Between Scylla and Charybdis” from its fourth album, Shogun.
“That song has a catchy melody at the beginning and then goes into a very medal bass riff. I thought it would be good for an entrance song.”
Upcoming games
The baseball team begins a three-game homestand against the University of Louisiana at Monroe on Friday, April 17, and then heads out on the road to Mississippi State. The ladies have a doubleheader in Evansville, Ind., on April 21, a doubleheader against Tennessee State in Nashville the following day, and they begin a three-game series in Murfreesboro against Florida Atlantic on April 25.
