Exactly one month before his sixteenth birthday, Preston was diagnosed with B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and categorized as Very High Risk due to his age and size. He had to take a hard step back from racing while undergoing treatment because of the impact racing has on the body.

Preston spent about half of his life in Riley Children’s Hospital undergoing 3.5 years of chemo. He finished high school despite missing so many classes and having to self-teach himself a lot of the time. He even became a Certified Solid Works User through his local career and technical school. Many working engineers and graduating college students can’t obtain this level of certification, so for him to achieve this was an extremely huge accomplishment. He was awarded the Kiwanis award for his excellence in Mechanical Engineering and continued achieving a 4.0 GPA into college. Preston’s mother, who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2018, always pushed him to do his best in school and pursue his dreams. 

By having to spend so much time in the hospital, Preston had a lot of downtime to think about and envision his next big plan for life. He and his father would walk laps around the hospital and talk for hours, and when it was too difficult for him to walk as much, they would spend hours watching off-road desert racing videos and learning as much about the sport as they could. Preston’s dream of building a desert racing team began to grow. 

Despite everything Preston had going on in his life, he wanted to give back and help people like him and his mother who were battling cancer. He got involved with Curing Kids Cancer and other organizations and helped them raise more than $200,000 for cancer research. Preston was inspired by those around him who genuinely cared and wanted to help others. He dreamed of creating his own foundation that could help kids of all walks of life achieve their own dreams. 

When presented with an opportunity by Make-A-Wish® Ohio, Kentucky & Indiana, Preston chose to wish for his own shop that would help him build his dream desert racing team and gain the credibility he believed he needed in order to form his youth foundation. After talking with Preston, Make-A-Wish representative Kristina Rhodes discovered that Preston’s true wish was to create a youth foundation. Preston learned that he didn’t need credibility upfront, that he could create the foundation first and work backward, growing his shop and team through the foundation instead of the other way around. Preston was connected with Michael Davis of VPS Architectures and a local marketing agency, EXTEND GROUP, who have since helped him build the Off-Road Motorsports Youth Foundation (OMYF) as a nonprofit organization and create a brand for OMYF. 

Since his mother’s passing in the fall of 2019, Preston has continued to help raise money for charities, keeps up his 4.0 GPA in college, and is working with community leaders to build his Off-Road Motorsports Youth Foundation dream.