A glittering tradition: Here's what happens before ball drops on Daytona's New Year's Eve
HOLLY HILL — For revelers that pack Daytona’s Main Street on New Year’s Eve, the illuminated ball drop that counts down the final seconds of 2023 is a fleeting, if crucial, moment that happens in an instant.
For Phil Weidner, who literally looks out his back window at the imposing metal sphere every day of the year, it’s the culmination of weeks of preparation to ensure that a beloved ritual unfolds without a hitch.
Since Thanksgiving weekend, when Weidner hosed spiders and grime off the structure that he built nearly a decade ago with his business partner Randy Smith, the two men have been stringing lights, testing Wi-Fi-operated controllers and experimenting with new ideas to make the World’s Most Famous Beach’s biggest celebration of 2024’s arrival a memorable one.
“We built this thing from scratch,” said Weidner, 60, best known as the patriarch for nearly 25 years of popular regional music festivals that include the DeLand Original Music Festival, among others.
When it was built in 2016, the ball didn’t even meet that basic definition, making its debut as a bare-boned metallic spine accessorized by a lighted triangle, Weidner said.
Since then, it has morphed into a 550-pound welded-steel behemoth that stands 14-feet-tall, equipped with 24 crescent-curved ribs adorned with more than 14,000 flashing LED lights. Inside the sphere, another 3,000 lights accent a labyrinth of steel girders that call to mind something out of “Star Wars.”
“We go through a lot of lights,” Weidner said, hoisting a plastic garbage can filled with spares.
Smith, who works with Weidner producing festivals and events for the nonprofit Holly Hill-based Songwriters Showcases of America, nods knowingly.
“I’ve got some in my kitchen, too,” he said.
On New Year’s Eve, the ball will become the center of attention, hoisted by a crane some 80 feet above the intersection of Main Street and Wild Olive Avenue. There, augmented by additional on-board spotlights and strobes, it signals the start of a new year.
To get it to Main Street, Weidner, Smith and a few hired hands will start work at around 9 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, using a winch to lift the sphere atop a trailer hitched to a pickup truck for a slow-moving 45-minute commute into Daytona Beach.
Along the way, spotters are alert for any low-hanging limbs or utility lines.
It’s the culmination of a project with a $5,000 budget based on public-private partnership involving the City of Daytona Beach, Main Street merchants and others.
Inspiration comes from unlikely sources
On a recent evening, Weidner and Smith climb ladders and haul cables to push this year’s ball toward completion, occasionally trailed across the cluttered yard by Weidner’s loyal hound dog, Rudy.
“I’m giving it a haircut,” Weidner said, as he trims loose ends on dozens of zip-ties at the top of the sphere. “If I never had to tie another zip-tie the rest of my life, my life would be better.”
Along with that kind of less-than-exciting work, there also are moments of inspiration.
This year, one such revelation came as Weidner pulled away clinging potato vines that had attached themselves to the structure throughout the year: Why not wrap the strings of lights around the ribs, vine-style, instead of running multiple strings of the lights straight up and down?
“It was a lightning bolt, a ‘Eureka!’ moment,” he said. “We’re using fewer lights, which is a more efficient use of our resources, and it looks so much better. To me, it’s a lot more of a gorgeous, sexier appeal.”
All kinds of ideas cross Weidner’s mind throughout the year as he stares at the giant metallic ball the backyard of his Holly Hill home, not far from 10th Street and Ridgewood Avenue.
“The only time you’re not going to see this in my driveway is on New Year’s,” he said.
Curious neighbors, at times, have asked about whether the object is a homemade “wall of death” prop for daredevil motorcyclists, he said.
Although the ball is only officially in use one day a year, it doesn’t need to be illuminated with nearly 20,000 lights to be interesting, he said.
“Even when it’s not doing anything, it’s a pleasure to look at it on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “You look at it and come up with ideas.”
Ball drop 'a key element' of Daytona's New Year's celebration
Some of those ideas ultimately don’t succeed, such as an attempt to put lasers inside the cube at the heart of the sphere.
“There wasn’t enough room for the light to funnel out and cover the area,” Smith said.
Likewise, an attempt at incorporating a confetti cannon also was short-lived. Instead, this year a camouflaged “Ninja Confetti Team” with confetti cannons will operate on the ground.
One new idea for this year that is still in the works is incorporating hologram images into the base of the sphere, an effect to be created by shining LED lights on a whirling fan blade.
“As the fan blade turns, the lights will create a 3-D image,” Weidner said.
For Al Smith, owner of Al Smith Productions and event producer for the Main Street Merchants’ Association, the prospect of that kind of imagination is the reason he tapped Weidner to take creative control over the New Year’s Eve ball.
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Before the current ball made its 2016 debut, the Main Street New Year’s Eve events offered oversized TVs placed strategically on street corners to broadcast ball drops and festivities from New York’s Times Square and elsewhere, said Smith, who is no relation to Randy Smith.
“I met with the Main Street merchants and told them, ‘We’ve got to have our own,’” Smith said.
Initially, that homegrown creation was no more than a shiny disco ball, but that was before Smith put Weidner on the assignment.
“You don’t just Google ‘ball-drop operators’ in Daytona Beach,” he said of the challenge of finding someone to take on the mission. “It became very important that we find somebody local, somebody we could trust. When it comes to New Year’s Eve, the ball drop is the key element to the whole thing.”
At the time, Weidner admits, he had never tackled anything like it, but he was ready to try.
“I said, ‘Sure,’ even though I didn’t know how we were going to do it.”
As he prepares the ball to drop again for 2024, Weidner also admits that it’s a job filled with the potential for disappointments.
“Every year, there’s something that I only I know about that isn’t working,” he said. “Then, I go into months of depression because we spent all this time working on it.”
At the same time, there’s also elation during those roughly 30 seconds of glory in the spotlight.
“The closer you get to midnight, it’s a magnet for people,” he said. “They fight just for a spot to get close to it.”
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: New Year's ball drop on Daytona's Main Street requires months of work
