Yellowcard headlines the 97X Next Big Thing Legends show Friday at The BayCare Sound in Clearwater, bringing frontman Ryan Key and fiddler Sean Mackin back to the site where the festival first put Tampa Bay's alternative scene on the map. The Jacksonville pop-punk band tops a bill that also includes Waterparks and Dylan Cotrone, with tickets starting at $60.
The concert marks a full-circle moment for both band and festival. As reported by Creative Loafing Tampa, 97X's Next Big Thing has a 25-year history, and it started at Coachman Park — the same waterfront grounds where The BayCare Sound now stands. Yellowcard's own ties to the station run deep: the band has a multi-decade connection to 97X, having played Next Big Thing 3 in the early 2000s and recording several acoustic sessions in the station's Green Room before landing the top spot on this year's Legends bill, according to 97X.
Yellowcard built its name on 2003's breakout album Ocean Avenue, now 23 years old per Creative Loafing Tampa's reporting. Both the record and its title track were certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, a commercial run detailed by uDiscoverMusic. The album's violin-driven pop-punk sound became the band's signature and remains central to the nostalgia pitch behind Friday's show.
A Band That Came Back From a Breakup
Yellowcard disbanded in 2017 after a 20-year run before reuniting in 2022 at Riot Fest, according to background compiled by Western Student Press. Since then the group has released the 2023 EP Childhood Eyes and, last year, their 11th studio album, Better Days. That steady return to active recording and touring sets up Friday's performance as both a nostalgia trip and a showcase for newer material.
97X's Next Big Thing itself has a well-documented origin. The festival debuted on December 2, 2001, at Coachman Park with 15 bands — including Sum 41 and Jimmy Eat World — drawing 17,000 fans for a $20 ticket price, according to a 97X retrospective. The event was created by former program director Michael Sharkey to help WSUN-FM 97.1, which adopted its alternative rock format in late 2000, compete with regional festival draws.
Supporting Acts Bring Genre Range
Co-headlining support comes from Waterparks, a band formed in Houston in 2011 that has blended pop-punk with hyperpop and electronic elements on its way to two Top 50 Billboard 200 albums — 2019's Fandom and 2021's Greatest Hits — per AllMusic. Opening the show is Dylan Cotrone, a Florida-born, Los Angeles-based acoustic singer-songwriter who has built an audience through appearances on channels like Sugarshack Sessions, offering a quieter counterpoint to the pop-punk lineup.
The show unfolds at a venue that has quickly become one of the region's most prominent stages. The BayCare Sound offers 4,000 covered canopy seats and room for 5,000 more on its general admission lawn, and it is owned by the City of Clearwater and operated by nonprofit arts organization Ruth Eckerd Hall, according to Visit Florida. It anchors Clearwater's $84 million Imagine Clearwater renovation of Coachman Park, which opened in June 2023 and transformed 19 acres of underused waterfront into a regional entertainment hub, as reported by the Tampa Bay Times.
The amphitheater's rise has been fast by industry standards. Trade publication Pollstar ranked The BayCare Sound as the top outdoor amphitheater in Tampa Bay and third in the country among venues with capacities under 10,000 based on gross ticket sales, per Visit Florida's account of the venue's first two years. That commercial success has made Coachman Park a magnet for touring acts, a trend Hoodline has tracked with Squeeze's recent stop at the same venue.
Friday's concert lands amid a busy stretch of programming at Coachman Park, following major multi-day events like the Clearwater Jazz Holiday and the Clearwater Sea-Blues Festival earlier this year. For longtime 97X listeners, though, the Yellowcard-led Legends bill carries a different weight: a band that once played Next Big Thing as rising up-and-comers is now closing out the loop, more than two decades later, on the same patch of Clearwater waterfront where it all began.
