Wilmington Student to Participate in State High School Automotive Competition

By SUSAN PETRONI (Patch Staff)

WILMINGTON, MA - Wilmington’s Andrew Brown, along with Tewksbury’s Nicholas Chiccarelli are a team from Shawsheen Tech taking part in this year’s Massachusetts State Automobile Dealers Association (MSADA) competition for high school students.

This year the event is being hosted by Massachusetts Bay Community College and is being held on Saturday, Feb. 6.

High school junior and senior students from across Massachusetts will compete in a written and hands-on automotive technology competition to try and land the top spot to advancing to the National Automotive Technology Competition held at New York’s International Auto Show in March.

The competition will include a hands-on diagnostic challenge that tests students’ overall auto technology knowledge.

In January, 75 automotive education students from 10 Massachusetts high schools participated in the written part of the competition. The results of both the written test and the hands-on challenge will be combined and the top high school senior team will advance to the national competition to represent Massachusetts.

This automotive competition gives area high school students the opportunity to test their skill and ability in automotive technology against some of the best high school automotive students in Massachusetts. The hands-on portion of this competition is performed on a Toyota vehicle to test student’s expertise in diagnostics and system wide automotive knowledge and is based on what students might face as they work in a real world automotive environment. Students are competing not only to advance to the national competition in New York, but they are also are vying for scholarships and prizes.

The teams that will compete in the hands-on competition Saturday are:

Senior Teams

• Assabet Valley Regional HS - Derek Jewell and Meghan O’Connell

• Blackstone Valley Tech - Daniel Rice (Uxbridge) and Matthew Braz (Milford)

• Bristol Plymouth Regional HS - Jonathan Arruda and Justin Albernaz

• Essex Agriculture &Technical HS - Ted Glaros and Fabricio Aguiar

• Greater New Bedford Regional HS - Michael Curry (South Dartmouth) and Christopher Proulx Jr. (New Bedford)

• Old Colony Regional HS - Samuel Morse and Brendan Senior

• Pathfinder Regional HS - Paul Jones and Brandon Kroll

• Shawsheen Tech -Andrew Brown (Wilmington) and Nicholas Chiccarelli (Tewksbury)

• Silver Lake Regional HS - Ben Eosue (Halifax) and Jake Hatch (Halifax)

• Southeastern Regional HS - Robert Mayo and Rachel Tillson

Junior Teams

• Southeastern Regional HS - Joshua Fournier and Austin Nelson

• Bristol Plymouth Regional HS - David Longee and Matthew Veader

• Assabet Valley Regional HS - Evan Mancini and Keith Petrie

• Blackstone Valley Tech - Bailey Martin (Upton) and Allen Turner (Douglas)

The competition is free and open to the public, anyone interested in attending can RVSP by contact MassBay Automotive Technology Center at 781-239-3030.

The competition will take place at the MassBay Community College Automotive Technology Center at 270 Eliot St. in Ashland starting at 9 a.m.