2,000 competitors took part in 67 different competitions from across Ontario competing in the 27th running of Canada’s largest Skilled Trades and Vocational competition. This year’s competition is the last time the event will be hosted by RIM Park in Kitchener Waterloo as the competition space required to run this event is now too small, imagine 360,000 sq. ft. not being enough. The event is moving to the Toronto Congress Centre in Mississauga next May which has around 500,000 sq. ft. of potential competition space.
Sheridan’s team of apprentices and post-secondary students numbering nine for this year’s event competed in a wide variety of competitions that included; Industrial Mechanic Millwright, Precision Machining, CNC Machining, Electrical Installations, Web Programming and Architectural Technology and Design.
All the competitors with their faculty advisers worked extremely hard on their own time outside of their classes and around their work schedules to get ready for the unique challenges an event like this brings. Each competitor is outside of their “comfort zone”, it is not the factory, facility or their place of work that they are used to, but a strange environment man made for the duration of the competition.
Each competition lasted one full day, approximately 8hrs of a wide variety of tasks and challenges, that in some cases were one large project or a number of timed challenges that were rotated through over the course of the day, the exception is the CNC Machining competition that is run over two days.
The medal winners were Peter M Giarrizzo (Gold), Paul Stockham (Bronze) Industrial Mechanic Millwright, Kacper Lasecki (Gold), Dan Van Veen (Bronze) Precision Machining, Jordan Trevision (Silver) Electrical Installations and George Kye-Asiamah (Bronze) Web Design.
Each of the faculty advisers, Craig Brazil, Chris Doucette, Scott Steinhoff, Jordan Martin, Harsh Taskar and Ann Cadger to a person said, “the success they achieved was all put in place by their efforts prior to their specific competition and the “calmness” each of their competitors showed during the course of the day was the difference, mistakes are made, it is putting that to one side and getting back on track was the difference in getting a medal and not getting a medal as it the culmination of all the marks that separates the individuals”.
Both Peter and Casper will now travel to Moncton as part of Team Ontario for the Skills Canada National competition to be held over two days on June 6th and 7th, they will now have a short time to enjoy their great success and get back to preparation for the National competition as again everything ramps up to the next level as it is now the best in the country competing against each other in each contest area.
Jordan Trevision (Silver) – Electrical Installations
Harsh Thakkar with his Web Design competitors George Kye-Asiamah (Bronze) – Web Design.
Peter M Giarrizzo (Gold) – Industrial Mechanic Millwright
Paul Stockham (Bronze) – Industrial Mechanic Millwright