Junior Joe Holloway, the Sno Daze DJ, said he learned a lot from past dances about what works and what does not, and noted the biggest key to successful dances have not always had to do with himself.

“What I think worked well was just the amount of people that went in the first place and the amount of reaction we got,” Holloway said. “If there is a big crowd of people, and they are all dancing, they have a better chance of influencing other people to dance too at the same time. I think (there is) strength in numbers.”

Holloway said he began DJing five years ago, but first started working with the school last year at prom.

Holloway said preparing for a school dance is actually quite simple.

“I just freestyle. I just get a whole bunch of music that I see and I just mix songs one after the next, just play songs,” Holloway said.

At Sno Daze, Holloway said he plans to use his DJ experience as well as his knowledge as a high school student of popular music to best decide what to play at the dance.

“I usually get a sense of what other students want to hear because I am still a high schooler, and I have a basic sense of what people listen to. And from recent dances too, I can see what songs work and what songs don’t work, what songs people all know and what songs people don’t know at all,” Holloway said.

Sophomore Zion Chappell said he understands the difficulty of satisfying everyone’s music interests, but thinks Holloway has done a good job thus far in school dances.

“The reason for the people coming there is to dance to the music. I think it definitely gets hard trying to please everyone, trying to get everybody’s song in there. So I understand that some songs are not going to get in, some songs are going to get in that you do not like, that sort of thing. I commend that he gets the songs in that he does,” Chappell said.

Holloway said at Sno Daze he aims to stay busy at the DJ table, mixing songs and enhancing them as he sees fit.

“I (will be) mixing music, playing one song, preparing the next song to play and at certain times blending both songs together at the same time,” Holloway said. “Some songs I (will be) doing certain forms of turntablism, and that is manipulating the songs in different ways, scratching, beat juggling, changing the tempo (and) beat matching.”

The Sno Daze dance is at 8 p.m. Feb. 25 at the Bayview Event Center.