Sept. 16, 2024

This paid piece is sponsored by Knife River South Dakota.

Think parallel parking can be a challenge for you?

Try doing it behind the wheel of a Ready Mix truck that’s more than 30 feet long and up to 10 feet wide.

Got that mastered?

Now try to make a tight turn around a barrel, or drive up to a tennis ball sitting on a cone – getting close, but not so close you knock it off.

Those are among the challenges faced by a group of Knife River drivers who competed this summer in the first “truck rodeo” held by the Sioux Falls operation.

It was the initial round of a broader competition across the company, held in the parking lot adjacent to Howard Wood Field.

“I had been to a Knife River course in Oregon and met the truck supervisor, and he told me how much fun it was and how cool it was, so we were interested and encouraged to enter,” said Rick DeVries, Ready Mix supervisor.

Any Knife River driver was eligible for the competition, which began with a 75-question quiz and including a pre-trip inspection from South Dakota Highway Patrol to assess how ready drivers were to operate their trucks.

“And then we moved onto the driving portion,” DeVries said. “Nobody had seen it before, so we got a good crowd of both our employees and their families.”

For 10 events, competitors tested their skills.

They drove the trucks through obstacles that involved backing through cones without hitting tennis balls on them or attempting to hit a bullseye with a plumb bob hanging off the back of the truck.

In one, “you dropped the chute down to an egg on a cone, and if you dropped the egg you got zero,” DeVries said. “One guy cracked the egg but no yolk ran out. That was hard to call.”

The final challenge was bowling.

“We set up bowling pins and tied a bowling ball off the chute, and you had to drive up 50 feet and got five tries, and whatever you knocked down is what you got for points,” DeVries said. “It was really fun.”

Out of 500 possible points, most drivers totaled around 300, making driver Mike Mullins the clear winner at more than 400 points.

“He’s a great, conscientious driver,” DeVries said.

Mullins also didn’t begin his career driving commercially. Instead, the California native worked as a chef for 13 years, moving to Denver and meeting his future wife, a native South Dakotan. He later worked in uniform sales before leaving the industry to become a driver for a beverage company and learning about the opportunities at Knife River.

“I like to compete – it’s how I’m wired,” he said. “For me, it’s not as much about winning as it is challenging myself.”

Leading up to the competition, he practiced parallel parking, stopping and using things like rocks while on job sites to mimic what it would be like to try not breaking the egg.

“It was a friendly competition, and I was happy I did pretty well,” he said.

Recently, he and DeVries went to the Knife River training center and course in Oregon for the chance to qualify for nationals.

“When we practiced the day before, he was spot on – I had him placing in the top three,” DeVries said.

Unfortunately, Mullins finished just a few points away from a national qualification, though “as far as I’m concerned, I’m a winner because I got to go to Oregon, plus I have a brother there so I got to see family,” Mullins said.

“Their training facility is really cool, so it was a lot of fun and it was eye-opening to get to see some really good drivers. Hopefully I’ll be able to compete again next year.”

In the meantime, he’s also earned something else at Knife River: A promotion.

“We’ve been wanting to hire a lead driver, and he’s a great fit for it,” DeVries said. “Although technically his finish in the truck rodeo had nothing to do with it.”

For Mullins, the experience at Knife River has been unlike any anywhere he’s worked, he said.

“I said they’ll have to kick me out of here – I won’t go anywhere else,” he said. “I just really like the camaraderie and family feeling. And their approach to safety is way beyond anywhere I’ve worked. It’s always a topic and you know it’s important to them.”

That’s reflected even in something like the truck rodeo, DeVries agreed.

“Training is important to us. It goes hand-in-hand with safety and that’s why we invest in it,” he said. “This is a unique way to test your skills, but it shows we take this seriously and we’re also a fun place to work.”

To learn more about growing your career at Knife River, click here.