WINNEMUCCA - Lowry High School qualified to send a team of two students to the statewide auto shop competition held in Reno May 8 and 9. The two juniors were Anthony Manzo and Courtney Decker.
The first step in qualifying to go to the state competition is a written test; the top two scores for each high school are combined and sent in.
In the second step of qualifying, the combined score for each school is compared with the combined score from every other Nevada high school, and the top 10 schools qualify to send a two-person team to the state competition. Lowry High School has had students place high enough on the test to qualify to go to state every year.
Lowry's two-person team qualified in the top 10, and Courtney Decker and Anthony Manzo traveled to Reno to measure their skills against nine other teams.
Decker said, "When I walked into the competition several people said, 'You must be Courtney Decker,' and told me I was pretty much the only girl to qualify for the competition on the whole western side of the country."
Lowry High School auto shop teacher John Aberasturi said the first year he taught in Winnemucca, Courtney Decker's father, Bob, was one-half of the Lowry team (the other was Jim Heit) that qualified to go to the state competition.
Courtney Decker has been in auto shop class for three years, but that was hardly her start.
She said, "My dad's really into shop, so I've always been in the garage."
Decker has her own car, which she drives to school and around town on the weekdays and which she drag races at Winnemucca Raceway on the weekends. She has every intention of taking auto shop again next year, and of being involved with cars all her life.
Manzo has been in auto shop for three years, but the class is also just a small part of his experience fixing vehicles. His father has owned Manzo's Garage for three and a half years, and Anthony has worked there for his dad since he was about 13 years old.
Manzo said, "I've been working on cars with my dad since I was a little kid."
Manzo says he'll probably attend the Universal Technical Institute in Sacramento to study more about vehicle repair and then come back to Winnemucca to work in his dad's garage.
The state competition was hands-on, with 10 brand new cars all bugged identically with the same problems, including a hood that wouldn't open, headlights that wouldn't work, the car wouldn't start, the gears wouldn't shift, the trunk wouldn't open and so forth.
Each qualifying school's team of two students had 1.5 hours to identify the problems, fix as many of them as possible and get the car running.
Decker said they did really well at the start, and were pretty excited. "We got the hood open and got the car started right away, but then we were trying to get the lights to work and it wouldn't shift into gear."
Aberasturi said, "Decker and Manzo were the first team to get their hood open and the second team to get the engine running, but then they hit a wall in trying to solve the other problems."
He noted they were disappointed in their 10th-place finish but faced it with a good attitude, saying it was an achievement just to make it to the state competition.
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