The Cones Hit Today Are the Memos of Tomorrow
EVOC Insider Newsletter #012
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My Happy Place. If you know, you know.
That's all I wrote when I posted a photo recently — a cruiser gliding through a wet slalom, sun high, one car on track, nobody else in the frame. Three words. No explanation needed.
The response told me this newsletter needed to go there.
What the photo didn't show was the hour before it was taken. May, early morning, air still cool. Me on the track alone, placing cones. No students yet. No questions. Just the layout taking shape on the pavement, cone by cone, until everything looks exactly right.
There's a calm to that moment that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't felt it. And then the students arrive — and it becomes a whole different job.
When They Arrive
The quiet doesn't last long.
The moment the first car pulls in, the energy shifts. You can feel it before anyone says a word. Some of them come straight at you with questions — about the course, about the day, about what's expected. They're nervous and they're covering it with noise. Others hang back near the vehicles, arms folded, watching. Sizing you up. Waiting to see what kind of instructor you are before they decide how much to give.
Both types are managing the same thing. They just do it differently.
What they don't know is that I've already started. I watch how they pull in. Front in or reverse? Was it effortless, or did it take three attempts? Did they check their mirrors or just swing wide and hope for the best? The parking lot tells me things before anyone has turned a wheel on the course. I'm always watching — I just make sure they don't know it yet.
Your job in those first twenty minutes isn't to teach anything. It's to read the room and settle it. Get the talkers focused and get the quiet ones comfortable enough to take a risk. Because nothing useful happens on a cone course until the driver is willing to look a little foolish in front of their peers.
That's harder than it sounds. These are cops. Looking foolish isn't exactly in the job description.
The Clean Run Debate
Ask ten EVOC instructors whether a struck cone should result in a time penalty or an automatic failure and you'll get an equal split. Probably a few other options along the way.
I'm not one of the undecided ones.
My position hasn't changed in twenty-six years. A struck cone is a failure. Not a five-second penalty. Not a mark on a clipboard. A failure. Run it again.
Here's why.
There are no time penalties in the real world. When an officer clips a pedestrian, a cyclist, another vehicle — nobody pulls out a stopwatch and deducts five seconds from their response time. The consequences are immediate and they are real. So why are we training people to believe that cutting a corner has a cost they can absorb and move on from?
A colleague of mine recently put it better than I ever have. He said:
"The cones hit today are the memos of tomorrow."
I'm going to let that sit for a second.
The time-penalty system feels fair. I understand the appeal. It keeps things moving, gives everyone a score to compare, and softens the blow for the driver who's struggling. But what it actually teaches is that contact is acceptable provided you're fast enough. That's not a standard. That's a compromise dressed up as one.
The cone course is where habits form. What you permit in training is what you'll see on the road.
The Demo
I've hit cones.
I want to be clear about that before I say anything else. Anyone who tells you they've never clipped one during a demo is either brand new or not being straight with you. It happens. The question is what you do with it — and what it costs you when it does.
Early in my career I noticed a pattern. The days when the most cones got struck by students were almost always the days when the instructor struck one first. Not sometimes. Almost always. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand why.
When the instructor hits a cone, something shifts in the course. The standard drops — not because anyone announces it, but because the students just watched the person who sets the bar clip one and keep going. Permission was granted without a word being spoken. By the time the first student gets behind the wheel, the acceptable range of performance has already been quietly negotiated downward.
I've also seen the other version of this. The instructor who masks an inability to run the course cleanly by turning the demo into a show — speed covering for imprecision, the back end stepping out, students laughing as they climb out of the car. They think they're watching confidence. What they're actually watching is someone who can't do it cleanly and has found a way to make that entertaining.
The demo isn't a performance. It's a promise. This is the standard. This is what's possible. Everything that follows is measured against it.
So yes — twenty-six years in and I still hate hitting a cone on a demo. Not because of my ego. Because of what it costs them.
One Last Thing
The cone course is my happy place. I meant that when I posted it and I mean it now. It is the cones. It's the track. It's the entire scene — the smell of the pavement, the sound of tires working through a wet slalom, the sight of a cruiser threading a course that looked impossible an hour ago.
And yes, it's watching what happens in between. The nervous energy that walks in with the first car and the solid performance that drives out at the end of the day. That transformation — from arms folded and skeptical to clean runs and quiet confidence — that's what keeps me setting cones at sunrise.
The standard matters because they matter. The demo matters because it sets the table for everything that follows. And the quiet morning before any of it starts — that's just mine.
By the time this lands in your inbox I'll be somewhere over the American Midwest, heading to the IADLEST national conference in Texas. I'm looking forward to connecting with instructors from across North America and I'll have plenty to share when I'm back.
Until then — keep the cones standing.
Hugh
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Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon