Just weeks after graduating from Crestwood High School and the Maplewood Career Center, Ethan Thompson has been busy. The Red Devils’ alumnus is preparing to compete in the SkillsUSA Championship, a premier showcase of the country’s most highly-skilled career and technical students, which takes place from June 23-June 27 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.
“It feels amazing to know that one student born in this small town has the chance to be the best industrial electrician in the nation,” Thompson told The Weekly Villager on June 12.
Thompson is one of four Portage County students who will compete in the SkillsUSA Championship, alongside Garfield graduates Abigail Kaufman, Meganne Veccia, and Rootstown graduate Nadia Lough. Thompson will compete in the industrial motor control category of the competition.
If Thompson wins in the industrial motor control section of the competition, he will receive college scholarship offers, tools of the trade and even job offers immediately on the trade floor.
“I have been studying a lot,” Thompson noted. “I have my own codebook. My Dad and I have been doing projects at home so with it keeping fresh in my brain, I feel very confident.”
Currently working as a part-time electrician, Thompson acknowledged his career opportunities would exponentially expand with a strong showing at the biggest trade skills competition in the country.
According to Thompson, he has been skilled with his hands from a young age, having been inspired by his father, who also attended Maplewood Career Center and received training as an electrician. Thompson said that his father would often repair things around the house with his own hands.
In the final months of his second year at Maplewood, Thompson competed in a classroom competition to determine which student would represent Maplewood at the regional level of the SkillsUSA Championship under the industrial motor control umbrella.
According to Thompson, the classroom competition closely rivaled what would await the winner at the regional level. Each student was required to take a written test, build a functioning cubical, a 20×20 metal box containing several different electrical components and then bend a conduit to a specific measurement. The students were graded on a points system based on how high they scored on the written test but also how well they operated their cubical and bent the conduit.
Thompson ultimately won the classroom competition and earned the right to represent Maplewood at the regional SkillsUSA Championship.
“It felt amazing mainly because of how good my teacher is,” he added. “The hardest part about this whole competition was winning in my class. We have so many extremely smart students in there mainly because of our teacher because there is so much good competition in our class. Winning that felt good.”
Unlike the three other Maplewood students, Thompson did not compete in a regional competition because not enough trade schools entered the industrial motor control portion of the competition, so he advanced directly to the state competition at the Columbus Convention Center on March 18.
Although Thompson did not receive competition experience at the regional level, he still delivered a stellar performance at the state competition, winning first place in the industrial motor control section and guaranteeing himself a spot at the national SkillsUSA Championship.
“I stayed very quiet at the state competition,” he said. “I just stayed to myself, trusted myself on what I was able to learn and really didn’t focus on anybody. We had a few minutes before the test where we could introduce ourselves and talk amongst the others, but I really just stayed in myself and started to lock in.”
Thompson credited his success at the state competition to how difficult the classroom competition was; it served as great preparation.
Thompson acknowledged that he not only is acting as a representative of Maplewood but also of the Mantua communities.
“It is just a small industrial farm town full of farms and full of fields,” he noted. “It is just a small, hard-working town.”
Unlike the classroom and state competition, the national competition will last a week as each competitor will undergo more in-depth testing in the written exam portion and will also have to work with a larger cubical and several more conduits to demonstrate technical, engineering and problem-solving abilities.
“With the experience at state and how well it went, I feel very confident,” Thompson said. “I have been working with this stuff for a very long time now and I am really starting to feel good with what I am doing.”
