Where you can hear Heath West: Afternoon drive on WAVE 92.7 and midday on Coast 103.7
Heath West picked up a microphone as a teenager and hasn’t put it down since. The Vero Beach resident knew he wanted to be on the radio ever since he was a kid growing up in Okeechobee. “As a child, I had two record players in my bedroom,” he says. “So as one song ended, I was able to play the next one just like they did on the radio.”
His sophomore year at Okeechobee High School, when the school decided to send some students to local radio station WOKC for a “DJ for a Day” event, West jumped at the opportunity. After spending an hour on the air, he was hooked. “I went back to the station and told them I could do an hour every week and talk about school, activities, and the sports schedule and do requests from high school kids,” he says. The station gave him a weekly time slot, Saturday nights from 6 to 7 p.m. A few months later, the regular night disc jockey moved to Illinois, and West was hired to deejay six nights a week at the age of 16.
That first gig launched a career in radio that spans three decades at various stations, all in the local market. Since 1999, West has been a key personality on iHeart Radio’s hit local “new country” station, WAVE 92.7, where he helms the afternoon time slot on weekdays from 2 to 7 p.m. He is also the midday host on WAVE’s sister station, Coast 103.7, weekdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Over the years, West has been backstage with country stars like Luke Bryan, introduced Ronnie Milsap on the Lyric Theatre stage, and met countless other famous musicians, but he is rarely starstruck. “I met a lot of these stars when they were brand new and trying to become the next big thing,” says West. “So you cheer them on, and it’s good to see they’re having success…. But you knew them when.”
As West celebrates a milestone age this year, he looks back on his career with gratefulness: “I just turned 50, and I’m very happy and thankful in this day of change to still be on the radio and still be local.”
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