About Us

Creating a business like Drive for Excellence is something I have thought about for a few years now. As a parent of young children myself, I know the time of thinking about them getting their licenses will come sooner than I expect. When that happens, I want to rest comfortable knowing that I have a way of finding out if my children are driving safely or not BEFORE something bad happens.

At the age of 16, I was a back seat passenger in a small car driven by a friend of a friend. Both of them were 17. Within just a few miles of my house, we were in an accident. We were hit by a much larger car, spun around several times, and slammed into a parked van. The two girls in the front seat climbed out with nasty bumps, bruises, and were obviously shaken up. I was still in the back seat having been thrown around, knocked unconscious, and had what bystanders said looked like an epileptic seizure.

Once paramedics realized that I was still in the car and in bad shape, they ran to my rescue pulling me out of the passenger window (the car was a 2 door) and putting me on a back board with a neck brace. The first thought I remember having as I began to "come to" a little bit and they were loading me in the back of the ambulance was to tell the police officer and my friend not to call my mom because I didn't want her to worry. Next thing I knew, I was in the emergency room hearing a doctor and nurse talking about how they didn't know how I survived the accident. By every right, I should have been dead.

I continued to go in and out of consciousness but remember those moments of being awake quite clearly even almost two decades later. I remember the police officer staying by my side later to learn he wanted to wait with me until my mom arrived at the hospital. Another memory is of waking up to find my mom standing next to me crying as she tried cleaning my face, removing the glass and wiping the blood away. As a parent myself now, I can only imagine what she must have felt that night.

For the next several days my body was "locked up". I had to be stood up and laid down and then I could shuffle from the bed to the bathroom. I received a cut above my ear, a huge gash to the back of my head, and short term memory loss that lasted for many months. I had to go through many months of physical therapy and developed a neck problem as well as a problem with my lower spine where the vertebrae and tailbone seemed to have shifted.

For a long time after the accident, I suffered from nightmares where I relived the accident and while driving with anyone, my seatbelt was the only thing that kept me from falling to the floor of the car anytime another vehicle got too close to the one I was in. While this was a reaction I came to control to the best of my abilities, there are still moments when I feel this fear in the pit of my stomach and usually it is when I see someone driving unsafely.

Later I learned that the driver of the car I was in had been stopped a few times for speeding and driving recklessly but was never given any more than a warning so her parents never found out. This is why I created Drive for Excellence - for all of the parents who never want to experience what my mom did and for all of the teens who never want to experience what I did. Who knows? Maybe had the girl's parents known that their daughter was an unsafe driver, they would have done something about it and the accident that night never would have happened.