WEST BEND — The 51st annual SkillsUSA State Competition will begin on Tuesday at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, with other competitions held at both the Alliant Energy Center and Madison Area Technical College on Wednesday, and there will be 26 West Bend High School students competing in 12 different competitions for the chance to advance to the National SkillsUSA competition, held June 2428 in Atlanta.
Among the West Bend High School students in the competition are Traynor Gieryn and Greyson Degroot, who are part of the group competing in the Television and News Broadcasting competition.
“The two of us are in a group of four,” said Gieryn. “I’m the technical director. I’m in the back and I switch the cameras, and [Greyson] is one of the anchors.”
“So, I will talk about and say whatever script we make,” said Degroot.
For the competition, the group will be given several news articles to read through and decide how newsworthy each story is.
“Then we make a script with them,” said Gieryn. “And we get about an hour to an hour-and-a-half to do that.”
The group will then put their script into the teleprompter and practice their news broadcast before their competition.
“We have one run to do it perfectly, and we have to almost hit three minutes exactly,” said Gieryn. “So it’s a lot of pressure.”
“It’s tight,” said Degroot. According to the students, they are confident in their group, as they have a lot of experience in setting up a news broadcast for the school before getting involved in the SkillsUSA competition.
“We did this last year, setting up the broadcasting and stuff for the school, and I think it’s the first year in a few years that they’ve done that,” said Degroot. “So, it was just something that we were all pretty good at and decided we wanted to try.”
The students also said their teacher, Mike Bentdahl, helped push them to try out SkillsUSA, too.
“Mr. Bentdahl was a big inspiration for me,” said Gieryn. “Not to say that he forced me to do it, but he led me in the direction.”
The students also have experience at the National SkillsUSA competition in 2023 that they think will help them be prepared for the 2024 competition as well.
“We placed 11th last year, so we’re going to hope to do better,” said Gieryn. “…I think it’s going to help us to be prepared for what to expect …Hopefully, we can win [the state competition] again.”
Check out the Daily News throughout the upcoming week to learn more about other students who will be competing in Madison on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Source: West Bend High students get ready for SkillsUSA state competition
