The award for America’s top rookie truck driver with military experience may not be a high-profile honor … but the trophy is hard to miss.
Troy Davidson, a former mechanic with the Navy’s Flight Demonstration Squadron, better known as the Blue Angels, edged out two other finalists to claim the Transition Trucking: Driving For Excellence award in a Friday ceremony in Washington, D.C. He also claimed the grand prize: A brand-new, fully loaded Kenworth T680 truck with sleeper, which event sponsors pegged at a $150,000 value.
Davidson, 37, figures it’s worth about $170,000. “You know, that’s more than your average house,” he told Military Times in an interview days after the ceremony, when the honor was finally starting to sink in.
“This has been an overwhelming experience. I’m able, finally, now, to get some sleep,” he said. “It’s basically almost like living in the Blue Angels spotlight all over again.”
While fixing jet engines with the Blue Angels may not have been the ideal training ground for the behind-the-wheel portion of his job as a cross-country trucker, Davidson said the other lessons from his time with the squadron, and from eight years of military service, laid a much-needed foundation.
“Professionalism. Courteousness. The idea of, ‘If you’re on time, you’re already late,’ that type of thing. The discipline of today’s military, that we strive to have, that goes hand and hand with the trucking industry, because of the culture,” he said. “You have a place that you need to be, to pick up that trailer, to deliver it to somebody else.”
MENTOR AND AMBASSADOR
About 1 in 5 employees with Davidson’s trucking company, Werner Enterprises, is a military veteran, he said. As an ambassador for the company, part of his job for the last year or so has been to reach out to veterans and others seeking to become drivers, selling them on what Werner and the industry as a whole can offer.
One of those pitches at Truck Driving Institute in Milton, Florida, near Davidson’s home of Pensacola, led to a school staffer putting a short film together on Davidson’s experiences, in the cab and out. The video caught the attention of top officials at Werner, and a fleet manager decided to enter Davidson in the rookie-driver contest, sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Hiring Our Heroes program, Kenworth and Fastport, which works to link former service members with careers in trucking and other industries.
Davidson reached the finals along with Army veteran Kevin Scott and Russell Hardy, who served in both the Army and Navy prior to his military retirement. An online vote ran from September through Veterans Day to choose the winner; Scott and Hardy each earned $10,000 for reaching the last round.
But the big prize will head to Florida, with at least a stop or two in between. Davidson’s first step was to take his award to a Werner facility in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for what he called a “Werner-izing” – a full safety check and once-over by mechanics so that he can “get out on the road, making some money.”
Those road duties include a stop shortly after Christmas in Alabama, where he’ll pick up a student driver as part of his instructor duties. It’s another part of a gig he recommends to service members who aren’t sure what to do after leaving uniform, providing “you’re not afraid to travel and be away from home a little bit.”
