Awesome, you’re definitely making a good decision! What are you studying?
I’m going for business administration.

Back to the racing, you won your XC2 title in your first year of racing the class. What did you do to make this happen?
I definitely had my goals at the beginning of the year, but I didn’t know what to expect coming into round one. I talked to a lot of guys about what it was going to be like making the step from the amateur ranks into the XC2 Pro-Am class. They were telling me it was definitely going to be a faster pace and I knew there was going to be some stellar competition. So during the off-season I just did everything I could to get ready. I pushed myself day in and day out. It definitely showed early in the season. I took the win at three of the first four rounds, which was a huge deal for me. That ended up being a big confidence booster I was able to carry with me throughout the rest of the season. I really found out what I was capable of and learned a lot this year. 

When I was looking up your old results, I saw that over the last several years, there have been two other riders, Dayne and Dylan, who share the same last name as you. Are they relatives of yours?
Yeah, they are both my brothers. Dayne is my older brother by two years and Dylan is my younger brother, also by two years. They both used to race. We all did our local series, WYNOA, together but I’m the only one racing now. Dayne actually gave it up so that I could have his quad as a practice bike. He helped me out a ton and has been a huge source of support for me. Same with Dylan, I used to work on his machines so he could race and now he supports me too. He has kind of faded out of racing though because of his interest in football. So like I said, now it’s pretty much just me racing, but we’re all still involved. 

So how did you guys end up doing the GNCCs? I know being from New York, each race (except Unadilla and Tomahawk) is really a haul for you guys.
It is! We started off doing WYNOA, with each race only an hour from us. But we all watched the videos of the GNCCs and always thought about how cool it would be to travel to all these races. One year we were really thinking about doing it, and we went from thinking about it to going all out and hitting every round. It was kind of a spontaneous thing. 

And how did you get started riding in the first place?
Well, we had a couple of utility quads at our house growing up, and some buddies of ours actually had some sport quads too. We’d always go over there and ride all day, then I’d come home and ride our utility quads too. Unless I was at school, I’d be doing one or the other. After a lot of begging, like “we got to get into this” we finally ended up getting a couple of Honda 300 EX quads and I pretty much fell in love with it. 

Is there anything you like to do that isn’t riding?
Pretty much everything I do just so happens to be ATV related. I do a lot of mountain biking, that’s a side hobby that I really enjoy, but that kind of relates back to the racing. I do a little bit of drumming here and there. I guess that’s the only thing I really do that doesn’t involve riding or racing. That was actually all I did before racing, now it’s more of a hobby than anything.