The music behind the men

Sports – Dakota Student
If you’ve ever played a sport you know there’s one thing you can’t live without before your game. It’s your pregame playlist. The pregame playlist is essential to any athlete. It can get you riled up, calm your nerves or get you in the zone. No team is complete without their playlist blasting through the PA system and no athlete is complete without their personal playlist blaring through their earphones.
For the UND men’s basketball team, Geno Crandall and Roderick Bernstine are the two men in charge of the Hawks pregame pump up.
Nick NelsonDrick Bernstine dunks on Portland State’s Bryce Canda during UND’s regular season Big Sky championship win. Nick Nelson/ Dakota Student
“Me and Geno will switch off,” Bernstine said. “It’s been between me and him most the time. We’ll switch off after practice too.”
Bernstine was quick to mention how the responsibilities of the playlist is no small task saying it’s an eight on a scale of one to ten of seriousness.
“It gets a lot a people fired up,” Bernstine said. “You got to get music that’s not only popular but everybody knows so it gets everybody going. You can’t have the slow jams for too long.”
“There’s a couple everybody wants to hear,” Crandall said. “It evolves throughout the year when new songs come out we put it on and take some off if we get tired of hearing it.”
However, there are some boundaries for the team playlist in terms of types of music not allowed.
“We try to stay away from country,” Crandall said. “Nothing against country it doesn’t get us as hyped up as some other choices or even when we want to mellow out. We just have a genre we lean towards.”
Bernstine also added, “I really ...


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