The Collision Repair Education Foundation’s (CREF) new award honoring late cowboy technician trainer Jeff Wilson debuted at the 2025 SEMA Show and is set to repeat there annually, ensuring regular remembrance for his life and work alongside acclaim for that of each year’s instructor honoree.
It’s already doing so.
“We wanted a way to highlight and honor his memory, for all he did for his students,” and his active industry involvement, said Brandon Eckenrode, executive director of CREF.
The Jeff Wilson Award for Selfless Education was founded in memory of Jeff, who, along with his wife, Amber, and their son, Shiloh, was killed in the Texas flooding over the July 4 weekend. Inaugural recipient James Cook leads technician training at Ogden High School in Utah. It was given at an awards breakfast on Wednesday, Nov. 5, alongside CREF’s $726,500 in Benchmark Awards to 104 collision repair schools representing 5,000 students.
“It’s humbling,” Cook said. “Honestly, I feel I just do my job, and care an extreme amount about the students and their well-being.” He didn’t know Wilson before earning the award but said, “I feel I know him now. I did a ton of reading and shed a lot of tears.”
This was Cook’s first time at SEMA. “It’s always been on my bucket list, out of my comfort zone. I’d never wanted to take a week off and leave the students.”
He has taught at the high school for 20 years, with another 15 years spent in a advanced automotive training program, a time frame similar to Wilson’s in Texas schools. Ogden High School this year received $5,000 in grant money from the Benchmark Awards — not its first rodeo as a recipient.
‘One in a million’ … and one of about 80
“Everything I’ve read, he’s one in a million,” Cook said of Wilson.
This year, Cook is one of about 70 to 80 — roughly the number of applications CREF received from the nation’s 950 or so programs, according to Eckenrode and Adan Ibarra, who chairs the Houston-Galveston committee for I-CAR. Ibarra and his group read through the submissions “blind” — meaning without names attached — before choosing Cook.
“We read the submissions [and] talked about them,” said Ibarra, who presented the award to Cook at SEMA. Ibarra knew the Wilsons, owns Houston’s Leading Edge Collision, and had worked with Jeff over the years on many projects. “It was really tough. So many good instructors. All deserve some type of recognition.”
The award has local coattails and is going “on the road,” too, in a sense.
Locally, Ibarra said the Houston-Galveston committee plans to host a car show in the spring to touch a second area, raising money for I-CAR scholarships in Wilson’s name.
Ibarra and Eckenrode are working on this, planning to “sell registrations for the cars in the show and take other donations from attendees [by] a QR code,” said Ibarra, who is also I-CAR chairman.
Eckenrode said one of I-CAR’s most active volunteer committees is in Atlanta. “They did know Jeff, and they said, ‘Hey Adan, we want to make sure [the scholarship’s] supported.’” So the Georgia group decided to send $5,000 of its fundraising to the Wilson scholarship each year and put it into that fund.
About the spring car show, Ibarra added, “We want to have it at the high school where Jeff worked.”
The rooms where it happened
Wilson taught in the Humble Independent School District for 30 years, with most of that time spent at Kingswood Park High School, where he started the technician training program. Kingswood recently hired an instructor, Jose Chapa, to fill the position made empty by Wilson’s death.
“It’s an unfortunate story. Let me take a breath,” Chapa asked as he began an interview. “This is a big curve for me, learning about Jeff, the difference he made with students. I said, ‘I can do this. This is where I’m needed.’”
Chapa, entering his late 20s, has worked in collision repair from his teen years, including opening and owning a body shop. His exposure to the industry in Louisiana and Texas began even before that. “I was fortunate enough to grow up in the car business” through [my] parents’ car dealership, he said.
Chapa co-owned the body shop until 2024, selling it after a car accident made the daily grind more difficult. It catalyzed a desire to teach, and the opportunity at Wilson’s former school sealed the deal.
The work aligns with elements of his own recovery while bringing those practices and his shop experience for the benefit of the kids in the program. “I can make sure the students learn at a good pace, not running around a shop; I can focus more and spend time with individuals.”
He has some 40 students in automotive basics, structural repair, and a practicum and paint refinishing courses.
Chapa said he’s guided by a fairly simple philosophy to “do the right thing. Guide, teach the lesson, [then] give them hands-on time, let them trial-and-error [it]. As we make errors — and we’re gonna have them — students learn to fix them.”
That, along with solid grounding in safe practices, means “they can leave my shop and go into the work field, and shop managers and owners can trust” that they know how to do this, Chapa said.
Next stop: Chicagoland
Wilson’s reach extends from his Houston-area home, to Cook’s program in Utah, to SEMA in Las Vegas, to I-CAR in Atlanta. Add Chicago to the list.
JDM Collision owner John Melendez attended the SEMA event and the awards breakfast on Wednesday, where CREF presented its scholarships for the year and the Jeff Wilson Award.
“It’s an award of awareness and for his legacy,” Melendez said. “I was half choked up; it was a tearjerker as they brought out Jim Cook when Adan presented the award. It was for selfless education — that’s what really moved me … very moving; it was hard.”
Melendez is a tireless booster of I-CAR. “Anytime Brandon has a function, I’m there; I say, 'how can I help?’” — and he provides tech training in general. He’s planning an event at his Chicago-area shop on Dec. 2, alongside the I-CAR team at JDM Collision.
The daylong event walks 14 students from the Center for Academics & Technology at Thornton Fractional Township High School District 215 through the “step-by-step, real-life scenario of repairing a car,” he said.
Melendez grows volubly excited by the prospect, talking up T-shirts and safety glasses for the kids — we’re “hitting a home run on this” — and, apropos of the Jeff Wilson Award, their teacher, Jorge Navarrete.
Navarrete brought two of his graduates to JDM this summer. “They walked through the shop, the advanced paint and mix rooms, robotic curing … let them work with 3D CAD measuring,” and soon after, Melendez hired one of them. Now, one more than a baker’s dozen are coming to get an in-depth look.
Navarrete’s students have also been recognized at the competition.
“He’s the sort of guy you’d nominate for Jeff Wilson’s award,” Melendez said.
What the CREF awards look like overall and for the future
Melendez sat next to another nominated teacher at the CREF breakfast — “she was also in tears” — and looks forward to an annual award recognizing selfless education. “To have this man’s legacy, and having this award for future recipients …” his voice trailed off.
“They made a boot,” Melendez said, referring to the shape of the award plaque itself, a cowboy boot and spur. “He always wore boots.”
Eckenrode lauded Benchmark Awards’ grant program donors and recipients. The $726,500 given at the awards breakfast is a fraction of total annual CREF giving, which last year, including in-kind donations, hit $12 million. Six I-CAR committees — Atlanta, Broward County, Greater Philadelphia, Knoxville, Phoenix, and Rhode Island — kicked in, as did 20 collision industry organizations and one nonindustry foundation, according to I-CAR.
Eckenrode said the nearly three-quarters of a million dollars is 38% of 2025’s identified need, “the largest total amount we’ve given to date. … People don’t realize the full impact” of this, he said.
Paul Hughes