Terri and Joey Lynch have been team driving with Schneider for 15 years. As participants in the Schneider Home Run Program, they drive two weeks and then are off an entire week. This has allowed them to travel extensively, spend time with friends, and achieve life goals such as building their dream home.

Q. How long have you both been driving professionally?
T: It will be 15 years in August. We started together.

Q. All with Schneider National?
T: Yes.

Q. Who’s the better driver?
J: Probably Terri.

T: Right answer.

Q. What attracted you two to driving in the first place?
J: I was going through a career change. I had a grocery store for 14 years, and the property got sold out, and I was looking for something different to do. I was looking through ads in the paper, and there were all these ads for truck drivers. I jokingly said maybe I’ll learn to drive a truck, and she piped up immediately and said that is something she always wanted to do, and she jumped on it faster than I did. When we told her parents we had something we wanted to tell them, the first remark was, “You’re going to get married?” Terri said, “No we are going to take another job.” Her mother said, “You’re going to drive a truck.” It was a total change for her too, because she was in management and wore dresses and high heels to work and things like that all the time. She had never even been in a truck before… this was a total change for her and she loved it.

Q. Was that something, Terri, you always wanted to do?
T: Yes, I really did.

J: She had two things … this and a riverboat. She wants to at least get on a riverboat and honk the horn.

Q. What did you think it would be like?
T: Well, my main concern at the time was we were going to have too much time together. You know, the old “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” We got along just fine. He went to his job and I went to mine. So I thought oh my gosh, are we going to have too much time together. Little did I realize that we don’t have that much time together because one of us is always sleeping, basically. We have lunch together every day, but that’s it.

Q. It’s interesting that despite high turnover in the industry, you guys have been at it for 15 years with Schneider. Can you talk about that a little bit?
T: Well, Joey, do you want to take it or do you want me to?

J: Initially we wanted to do something where we could find a new place to live and build a home. But what kept us there is the fact that they kept us busy all of the time. We made good money and we had plenty of free time. After the first few years of meeting our goals we wanted to work hard, and about eight years ago they started a program called Home Run.

T: Right.

J: That allowed us to work two weeks and take a week off, and really changed the quality of our life. Like she said, we didn’t have much time together while we were working and when we’re home we have plenty of things to do with projects on the house and have a normal life.

Our friends would look at our annual calendar and they would plan things that they had going on with the times that we had off. It really changed our life because our first 6 or 7 years we worked about 2 to 3 weeks out at a time, usually 3 weeks with 3 or 4 days home. We did that because we wanted to earn money, keep busy, work hard, but you can’t do that forever. You’ll burn out after awhile. Free time is the big selling point for us now.

T: Yeah. It beats the heck out of working for a living. When we are out working we work hard. We try to average at least 1,100 miles a day for the time we are out, so if we’re out for say 20 days we better have 21,000 miles.

Q. So that’s how you balance out the free time part … when you’re out there, you go full bore.
J: That’s right. There are teams that will actually park and sleep for 3 or 4 hours a night every night.

T: Together.

J: We keep moving out there. You get plenty of sleep when you’re on the road. In fact, we get a lot more on the road than we do at home.

Q. Do you drive for a particular division?
T: One-way system is what they call it. We’re not dedicated to a special account. We are dedicated to our jobs, but we are not a dedicated account where we would haul the same freight all the time.

J: We prefer the variety.

Q. Why do you stay with Schneider?
J: The freight that they have keeps us busy. We don’t have much down time when we are out on the road.

T: Also, the company includes us in the planning processes. For years we were on the team advisory council where they bring in teams from all over the country, and ask for suggestions on how to improve our life out on the road. A lot of companies just say this is the way it is, period, take it or leave it.

Q. Is that where the Home Run program came from?
T: Oh yes.

Q. You mentioned the freight? Is it really different than what you haul with other companies in terms of the quality?
J: There are drivers who get a ride out West on a Friday and might not leave until Monday morning because of lack of freight. That’s happened only a couple times for us in all the time we’ve been with the company. We have never sat two days without a load, but with many companies that it is routine to sit a couple of days.

T: Yeah, and a lot of those that do sit aren’t paid for it. I mean, when you see trucks take down their barbecue grill on the catwalk and lawn chairs that tells you something.

Q. What would you say to someone else considering a career as a driver, or especially a team driver?
T: If they are going to drive as a team, they better both have the same set of goals. And they better be able to get along together because it is a real small state to live in.

Q. Are team drivers usually husband and wife?
T: The ones we see are mostly husband and wife. There are just friends driving and what not. We know several brothers teams, we have met father and son teams, we have met a couple of women that are friends who go together. We knew a man and a woman that weren’t married, in fact he was married to somebody else and this was his job, you know, he and she went out on the road for a 2 weeks at a time.

Q. What would you say is Schneider’s best attribute as a company?
T: Their willingness to listen.

J: The availability of freight for a driver is very important, and I think that’s the top thing because that’s when it comes down to the money.

Q. What’s your favorite stretch of road?
J: I like the stretch of I-84 through Oregon along the Columbia River, beautiful on the western part of the state.

T: I would say my favorite would be I-7B from Denver out to I-15. The stretch of Utah out there is just incredible. In the east, I-40 at the North Carolina and Tennessee border.

Q. What do you do for entertainment on the road?
J: Books on tape. That’s been fabulous. I mean XM radio is serious help, but books on tape we still listen to more than anything. We go through hundreds of books during the year.

T: Yeah, we probably go through 3 to 5 books a week. As far as the everyday things, yeah, we have our favorite restaurants that we stop at and that we know we can get in with the truck and they have good food and there is a place to walk around afterward.

J: The highlight of the day.

T: There are many times we get in the truck after lunch and he will say where we will eat lunch tomorrow.

J: 1,700 miles away and we already know where we are going to stop.

Q. It sounds like you have a great life going on.
T: Well, we enjoy it, and we do believe in the company. If we didn’t believe in the company we wouldn’t do what we do.