Meet the Champions: Auto Glass Week 2023 Competition Results from Virginia Beach

Auto Glass Week 2023 announced the winners of its skill-based competitions on September 28 after the event closed in Virginia Beach. The competitions — covering windshield repair, windshield replacement, ADAS calibration, and customer service — are among the most highly regarded technical benchmarks in the North American auto-glass industry.

The Auto Glass Week competitions serve an important function beyond individual recognition. They establish visible, reproducible standards for what excellent technique looks like in each discipline — standards that shop owners and training managers can use as aspirational benchmarks when developing their own technician programs.

The calibration competition, which had been introduced in recent years as ADAS work became central to the shop's service mix, drew particular attention in 2023. Calibration competitors perform ADAS system recalibrations under timed and judged conditions, with points awarded for accuracy, procedure adherence, and documentation quality. The competition structure reflects the real-world requirements of calibration work: it is not just about equipment capability, but about following OEM procedures precisely and producing documentation that verifies the system has been restored to specification.

For shop owners who did not send technicians to compete at AGW 2023, the competition results offer a practical development tool. Winners' approaches to repair, replacement, and calibration often contain actionable technique refinements that can be adapted and trained internally.

The 2023 competitions also reflected the growing diversity of skills now required of a competitive auto-glass technician. A technician who excels at windshield replacement but cannot perform calibration or pass a customer service evaluation is increasingly operating at a professional disadvantage relative to peers who have invested in the full skill set.

The calibration competition field grew larger and more competitive in 2023 compared with prior years — a direct indicator of how rapidly calibration expertise was spreading through the technician community. Its growth also gave training managers a broader pool of demonstrated procedures to compare with their own in-house calibration workflows.