PHP Convert Date/Time to Day of Week

Experts, I'm adding sports data to my Database from an XML Feed.

One of the important items is the event-date-time.  Here is an example:
<event-metadata event-status="" league="NFL Football" event-date-time="09/04/2014 08:30 PM"/>

$game_time = "09/04/2014 08:30 PM";
I add "09/04/2014 08:30 PM" to my database for this event.
This part works fine today.

Here is my question:
I'm now trying to also add the "Day of the Week"  to my database.
So something like this automatically calculating: $game_day = "Thursday";

In the example above, I'm trying to automatically get the "Thursday", or even "5" from the value in $game_time.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,
-Dan