Ryan Watts and Brian Knotts met in detention in fourth-grade and they’ve been friends ever since.

Even though Knotts moved away from their home in Canton, Ohio, soon after that day in detention, he returned every summer and the two would hang out and talk about how they were going to form a band someday.

Someday came at the end of 1996, when Watts and Knotts asked Don Sedlock, a buddy from Canton, to finish off the Sparechange lineup.

The name Sparechange came from the boys’ obsession with Mountain Dew. They would literally dig under the back seat looking for spare change to buy themselves a pop everyday before school.

The double zero was added later after they joined Cargo Records. That comes from Sparechange jerseys the boys had made for their hometown crowd in Canton. The jerseys has two zeros printed on the back of them.

Sparechange00 is: Ryan Watts, 21, guitar and vocals; Brian Knotts, 21, drums; and Don Sedlock, 22, bass.

Sitting at their manager’s house on their only day off during their current 31-day tour with Logan’s Loss, Knotts and Sedlock are watching “Evil Dead 3,” while Watts talks about playing at the “2000 Warped Tour.”

“That was awesome,” he says. “That has to be an experience I’ll be telling my grandchildren about.”

At the “Warped Tour,” Sparechange00 was slotted between Green Day and NOFX. They have also played with The Ataris, Dashboard Confessional, Fairweather, MU330 and M-Shop favorites, The Anniversary, as well as others.

Watts says he feels the band still has a lot of growing to do musically, but someday the band hopes to break into the mainstream.

Although they are enjoying their current role on the music ladder, Watts says it’s killing them financially.

“Right now we’re to the point where we’re paying the bills,” he says. “Right now we’re trying to find out where we’re going to get our next meal from. But we’re doing good, and we have a lot of doors opening up.”

One door opening up is the possible opportunity for Sparechange00 to be included on an American Eagle compilation CD which would be sold in AE stores. They are currently one of many bands included in the selection process.

Right now the band is out on the road in support of their new five-song EP, “Fifty Thousand Moments.” The EP was released on Cargo Records, previously the record label of Blink 182.

Watts said Cargo Records took out some of the instrumentation done for their EP because label didn’t know how to market them.

“We’ve been kind of held back at this point, especially with our EP,” Watts comments. “We did more instrumentation with our EP. We had piano and strings and things like that . . . They took the piano out and we kind of feel like it inhibited our musical growth.”

Sparechange00 has garnered comparisons to punk bands such as Lifetime, Avail and Face To Face, but have managed to avoid being categorized into a distinct genre. Not pop enough for the pop-punk scene, and not hard enough for the hard-core scene, Sparechange00 sits somewhere in the middle.

“Right now [our music] is very rooted in punk rock, and I think that’s part of our youth,” says Watts, who corrects his definition of his band’s music from punk/rock to rock/punk. “It’s good music to rock to, but not very good music to punk to.”

Sparechange00 may not have the punk rock attitude, but what they do have is sincerity.

“I think our future records are going to show that we write good, solid music that’s honest and sincere,” Watts says. “A lot of our music is about trying to live the most sincere life you can.”

Watts expects Sparechange00 to continue to grow musically with their individual musical interests surfacing further in future releases.

An example of this diversity can be found among Watts’ favorite artists. They include punk rockers Grade, Green Day and Saves The Day, and country star Garth Brooks. He explains all of those artists are “terribly inspiring.”

No matter what the future holds for Sparechange00, Watts says he just feels lucky to be in a band with his two best friends, doing what they always dreamt they would.

“In a way it’s like the core of my life,” Watts explains. “I look back on our older records, and it’s like the chronicles of my life so far. I think it’s really cool to have that. I don’t think a lot of people in the world have that.”

For now, Watts books most of the tours for the band, but their manager is in the process of looking for a booking agent. Watts jokes the name of this article should be “Sparechange00 looks for supporting tours.”

Sparechange00 has played in Iowa three times, including once at the Maintenance Shop last semester. Watts claims they’ve never had a bad turnout for a show in Iowa.

Sparechange00 will make a stop at Hairy Mary’s, 2307 University, Des Moines, Wednesday night with Logan’s Loss, Rocks and Rooftops and Ames punk-rockers, Blank Skeme.