On The Pegs May 2020 - Volume 5 - Issue 5 | Page 74

On The Pegs
74
them. The liability is just too great.” So that’s when we got to talking about me
being basically a sub-contractor. So I own the trucks and trailers and they sup-
ply the bikes and parts. That’s how it all kind of started in 2010. That’s when it all
started. We took it slow. Most of the time in the beginning, I was still doing the
riding schools hot and heavy so I would let the students test ride the bikes in-be-
tween lunch breaks and things like that. But then it started ramping up. Once Ya-
maha started seeing a few sales out of it, we started having more bikes and more
events. That’s what’s just completely taken over. I personally don’t do any more
riding schools. Emily, my wife, she does all the riding schools at our property here
in South Carolina now.
Didn’t you sponsor some kids, or still do?
Yeah. We did the race team for a number of years. When we had Ricky Russell
on the team we were very competitive and championship contenders. Then we
had a few rough years where riders got hurt and just bad results. So now I don’t
really do anything but Preston, my daughter, that’s kind of our race team is me
and Preston. The races I can go to. For her, that’s kind of our race team until Ya-
maha wants to do a little more. Randy does so much with the race team. Our goal
in the beginning was I didn’t want to compete with Randy, so our goal was my
team was going to be the feeder for the Am-Pro Yamaha team. So like Brad Bak-
ken. Brad rode for us for a number of years and he went to Randy. That was the
ultimate goal. Ricky did the same thing. He went to Randy. So we were going to
be the feeder, like Brody Johnson. Brody rode for us for a long time through the
youth. Our ultimate goal was to get them ready for the Am-Pro Yamaha team. We
had probably three bad years where the A guys weren’t finishing. They weren’t
finishing the year and things like that. Even the last year I did it, I put a lot in it.
We had a full-on tryout. We had 16 riders. We had eight on one day and eight on
another. Full try-out. We did lap times. We did heart rates. We took them training.
I wanted to make sure that those guys were serious about this. We had riders like
Ryder Lafferty, Cody Barnes… We had motocross guys. We had everybody that
we could. Even with that, of the two riders that performed the best on those days,
I would have rather had Cody at this point. Cody has progressed. He’s a good kid.
Like I said, I still do the race team but it’s just me and Preston. She’s doing all the
GNCC’s, all the full gas local races. She’s full on. This year is her first year on the big
bike full time. She’s 15. So she’s a little learning curve there with riding the morn-
ing race at a GNCC and all the people and lappers and bottle-necks. n