Education, Buy-In and Accountability

A little about me, I have had the unique experience of playing junior hockey for the last three years, starting first in the British Columbia Hockey League (BCHL) and most recently in the United States Hockey League (USHL). The first two seasons I moved to a city roughly 3 hours from my parents’ home in the Seattle area to live with a billet family. This was a very new and exciting, yet scary, experience as a teenager. I played these two seasons during my junior and senior years of high school and I was able to maintain a nearly perfect GPA of 3.96 of 4.0 all while playing 50+ games of hockey between September and February. Now in my third junior season, I have moved halfway across the country to play on a new team in Dubuque Iowa. Having this level independence at such an early point in my life has reinforced the need for driver’s education. In addition to the standard driver’s education courses, I was fortunate enough to attend a day long driving school which taught me a great deal about driving in different conditions and techniques for avoiding obstacles, among other things. Since I did not have the daily oversight of my parents it was on me to apply this knowledge to my day to day driving and having this awareness has benefited me greatly.

One of the key steps in reducing the number of deaths is to reduce distractions while driving. There is so much technology that surrounds us in everyday life, in-dash navigation, audio, electric mirrors, etc., and our personal portable devices. Add passengers holding their electronic devices, which we’re always glued to the screen, and you’ve created an environment where you could easily focus more on the people and the content of the screen than on where you are driving and the many surrounding activities while you are on the road. It seems each generation has been faced with its own set of dangerous driving habits, emphasis on each continues today. My grandparent’s generation rarely wore seatbelts, one of the largest concerns of my parent’s era was driving under the influence and we, as teens, are faced with these risks and the new challenge of driving while distracted. As I have learned through playing hockey, it takes a ton of discipline to insure you are making the right decisions while you are driving. The only real way to reduce dangerous driving habits is to practice the good decisions while you are behind the wheel. However, we know that peer pressure and the need to fit in often conflict in this decision-making process.

What I have found is that it is not only a personal commitment, but it requires the buy-in of your group of friends, and the continued education of those around us, by expressing the need to pay attention to the advertisements we see on TV about how dangerous distracted driving can be. We have committed as a team to “call each other out” if we are making a bad decision and empowered everyone in the group to make that call. We quickly discovered how beneficial this team effort was to keep us all safe when driving. It really hit the team hard when our teammate, and my roommate, lost a childhood friend to an accident because of distracted driving. Since we had made this commitment to each other, we were able to rally around and support him in his time of need, an unfortunate incident that reinforced the fact we need to be responsible behind the wheel.

Most teams and clubs have a code of conduct that each member has to follow, I believe that if there was an opportunity to introduce a code to avoid distracted driving into school club / team codes of conduct it would highlight the importance of safe driving and provide a means for us to hold each other accountable. As with peer pressure, peer accountability works!

“As a member of ___________________ I will not engage in activities that create a distracted driving enviroment putting myself, my passengers or other on the road in danger.”