Rod Hedrick ’26 turned lessons in trust and teamwork into a job in NASCAR’s fast lane

He didn’t come to Guilford College looking for a future in racing.

At the time, Rod Hedrick ’26 had something steadier in mind, something he could see and touch: a two-year community college degree, his own landscaping business, a life built close to home. Except football found him late in high school, and then, just as quietly, Guilford did too. A  place that felt less like a decision and more like a recognition. “I loved the campus, loved the atmosphere, loved the home feeling it gave off,” he says.

And so he stayed.

Not just on the football roster, but in the long, slow work of becoming someone other people turn toward.

It is easy, from the outside, to mistake a small college for a small story. But the scale at Guilford has a way of removing hiding places. You are known here – your habits, your effort, your character – and in that knowing, something begins to take shape. Rod felt it first in the daily repetition of football: the practices, the shared meals, the late nights with teammates who became, over time, something closer to family.

What surprised him was not the sport, but the responsibility that came with it.

By his sophomore year, he had seen enough to know what he didn’t want to become. “We could be better teammates than what we got,” he recalls thinking, the sentence carrying both critique and invitation. So he and a few other sophomores stepped forward. Not because they were asked, but because the absence of leadership made the need visible.

It is one thing to call yourself a leader. It is another to earn it.

That meant opening his East Apartment room to anyone who needed it. It meant listening, sometimes more than talking. Conversations ranged from the ordinary to the unbearable: what comes next after college, yes, but also grief, loss, the quiet unraveling that can happen far from home. “Being that shoulder to lean on,” he says, is what stayed with him most.

And in those moments, the edges of his future began to shift.

The landscaping plan receded, not all at once, but gradually, replaced by a different kind of clarity. Rod discovered that what mattered most to him was not just the work itself, but the people inside it. The rhythm of a team, the shared pursuit of something larger than any one person.

Which is how a conversation back home, almost casual in its phrasing – Do you want to come join us? – opened onto a new path.

Meet more members of Guilford's Class of 2026

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Rod says he will begin working with Richard Childress Racing, in the business side of an organization he has known about all his life. The company is based in Welcome, N.C., 20 minutes from his native Thomasville. The connection is personal – family friends, a hometown familiarity – but the appeal runs deeper. Racing, like football, is a system of interdependence: timing, trust, precision, each role essential and visible.

It feels, in other words, like a continuation.

Guilford did not change Rod by replacing one ambition with another. He says it did something  subtler. It expanded the frame. It showed him a wider version of the world. Teammates from different backgrounds, different losses, different ways of understanding what it means to move forward. Guilford, he says, asked him to find his place within it.

“It’s made me more of a man,” he says, and the phrase, simple as it is, carries the weight of what he means: more responsible, more aware, more ready for what comes next .

Soon, he will leave the daily familiarity of campus. The accidental meetings, the easy conversations, the sense that everyone is, somehow, within reach. He knows it will be hard. Change always is.

But that instinct to lead, to listen, to belong to something larger than himself that was built here will travel with him wherever he goes. “Guilford made me ready to take on almost anything,” he says. “I can’t wait to see what that looks like.”