The plumber, the mason, the electrician and the carpenter arrived a full hour early to collect their blueprints. They had two days in June to build an eight-foot by 10-foot tiny home inside the convention center in downtown Atlanta. They knew little else about their assignment, but they were anxious to get started.
And they were ready to win.
The four-person crew, all students at Belton High School in Belton, Texas, were defending the school’s title as the reigning national champions of mock tiny home construction. Every year, around 6,700 students participate in roughly 115 trade contests like auto mechanics, baking, cosmetology and robotics at the SkillsUSA Championships.
In Belton, a town of open fields and highways halfway between Waco and Austin, the prize for home construction could make the students stars. The teens could get a segment on the local television station, a spread in the front of the yearbook, a giant banner strung up in the high school wood shop and attention from local and national homebuilders who scout their school and the convention for talent.
Belton High was the winningest in the 23-year history of the national TeamWorks contest, taking the top prize three times, including last year. But those boys had graduated and the new crew had never competed at this level.
And yet, the new team — the plumber Joseph Fuentes, the mason Bryson Necessary, the electrician Erik Schiller and the carpenter Jack Clark — knew that winning was expected. They could sense it from their coach when he said things like, “You’ve got to be on your A game — like a boxer.” Or by the fact that their school’s principal was going to wake up at 4 a.m. and fly 1,000 miles to see them compete.
“It’s a lot of pressure,” Joseph, 17, the team captain, said during a practice in Texas. “It’s big shoes to fill.” The 2024 team had hammered their way to victory erecting a tiny home with two stories, exterior steps with a railing, and a three-pitched roof.
The new team won the state competition to represent Texas in Atlanta, but they were now facing 37 other state championship teams, some who were older and had been building together for years.
On that morning in late June, Joseph, Bryson, Erik and Jack watched other contenders arrive, a hum rising from the dense crowd of teenagers. When the doors opened for orientation, they were the first to grab their seats. “These boys are all business,” said their coach Michael Carillo. “They just want to build.”
The Road to Nationals
Carillo, 43, had been coaching young tradespeople to home-building victory for nine years. He knew the 2025 team lacked the experience and confidence of the chummy group of seasoned seniors who made up the 2024 team.
This new crew was formed with limited options from his advanced construction classes — only five students tried out for the four spots.
Still, Carillo saw the potential to mold a winning team.
Joseph was a junior, but his decision-making skills and ability to see the full picture made him an obvious choice for captain, Carillo said. Fascinated by how gravity moved water through pipes, Joseph had wanted to be a plumber as soon as he took his first construction class his freshman year at Belton. His older brother was a plumber, and told Joseph that if he learned all he could from Carillo and went to Texas State Technical College in Waco, where Carillo once taught, he could go even further. Maybe, one day, he would be a master plumber.
Plumbing became his varsity sport, a skill none of his peers could match, especially not the ones headed to four-year college. “People think it’s impressive that I know this at my age,” said Joseph, whose father owns a concrete business.
At 18, Jack, a senior who graduated in May, hadn’t thought about joining until Carillo suggested it. Jack wanted to learn electrical, but Carillo needed him to be the team’s carpenter. Algebra 2 had been a slog for Jack, but math clicked once he applied it to a carpenter triangle, a pencil and a circular saw.
Bryson, 17, joined Carillo’s class thinking he might weld, but Carillo directed him to masonry — and he found a rhythm to working with mud and brick, country blasting through his headphones. He grew up in the school’s wood shop, watching older boys drill, hammer and saw back when his mother was the director of the school’s Career and Technical Education program.
He wants to go into construction management, “so I’m not killing my body for the next 30 or 40 years,” he said. He recruited Erik, his friend since first grade, to enroll in Carillo’s class.
Erik spent last summer digging a trench to lay electrical line to the family’s party barn. The work was backbreaking, but he was amazed to watch his great-uncle, an electrician, weave wires through pipes in the earth.
While other classmates had to worry only about the regular coursework, the TeamWorks crew practiced three nights a week until 9 p.m. Sometimes, the four boys grabbed a bite at B Town Burgers near the school before the hourslong sessions. During winter break, the boys spent their vacation days in the wood shop. “He’s very pushy about practice,” Joseph said of Carillo.
Through all those evenings and missed vacations, the team developed a language, spoken more in gestures than words. If Jack accidentally dropped nails in Bryson’s mud, he’d get mud flicked at his ladder. If Joseph’s pipe crossed Erik’s wire, the wayward PVC might be met with a shove. “We all like to pick on each other a little bit,” Erik said. “If you make a mistake, we let you know.”
The team’s tempo was, at times, interrupted by Jack’s absence. As a senior and a striker on the high school soccer team, Jack ran with a different crowd and he missed practices. Once, when Jack had fallen asleep at home during practice, his teammates drove to his house to wake him up and made him return to school. Though they were sometimes frustrated with him, they knew they performed better with him.
In April in Corpus Christi, the team beat 12 other Texas teams to win the state title. Erik and Joseph also competed individually in their respective trades, intensifying their rivalry. Erik would later joke that he got the higher score at states. “By only one point,” Joseph noted. On that trip, all four boys really bonded, staying up late to goof off in the hotel room they shared, thrilled to be away from home. Bryson brought his Xbox, and he and Jack dominated at NBA 2K.
But in late May, in the final days before the national competition, practice was more difficult. Jack was missing again, this time he was on a family trip to Rhode Island. A heavy Texas rain pounded on the carpentry pavilion roof, and Journey blasted over the speaker, an electric guitar piercing through rain pellets and a whirring circular saw.
One boy short, Joseph, Bryson and Erik worked on a mock tiny house, even though they wouldn’t learn the details of the house they were expected to build until they arrived in Atlanta. Erik, not nearly as deft a carpenter as Jack, was cutting wood. The header above the house’s window frame was crooked and clunky.
Carillo pressed Joseph, the team captain: “What happened to that?” he asked, pointing to the header.
“I actually have no idea,” Joseph said.
“So what are we going to do?” Carillo said. “You’re going to eat it or you’re going to fix it?”
The next day, Joseph studied the ungainly header, gingerly touching a fresh bruise on his cheek bone. A little earlier, he’d lost control of a hammer drill and the handle had swung back and hit him in the face, sending him rushing to the bathroom and then briefly back home for ice.
Despite the pain, he knew what his team had to do. They had to fix it.
The Contest Begins
Two weeks later, Carillo, the team and their families were among 18,000 competitors and fans to descend on the Georgia World Congress Center for what can best be described as the Olympics for aspiring tradespeople.
The competition would last two days, but first they needed to get through the orientation. Jack worried he would be asked to build a roof that was too complicated for him. Joseph’s plumbing would be tested to make sure it was airtight. (“If it leaks, you’re done,” Carillo had warned him earlier in Texas.) Erik was so anxious he lost his appetite. “Nerves, it’s a lot of nerves,” he said.
The judges explained the rules: This design, the team learned as they unfurled their blueprints, would include three stories, a Juliet balcony, a window with an awning and a short brick wall. They would have to install rough plumbing and the electrical panel, outlets and wiring. Jack and Joseph filled their little black notebooks with directions from the judges that the team would later decipher back at the hotel room.
Hours later, the boys huddled in Joseph and Erik’s room with Carillo until 12:30 a.m., cowboy boots, white sneakers and Birkenstocks piled by the balcony door. Carillo knelt on the floor and scribbled math equations and sketches on a dry erase board. Joseph tucked his legs under the covers, worrying over plans riddled with tasks they’d never attempted like the Juliet balcony. Jack, in red checkered pajamas, paced. The three-story design meant stairs and stairs meant math, and Jack would have to rely on measuring tape and memory to calculate their rise. “If you can figure it out, we’re money,” Carillo said.
The next morning, the teams stood at their stations, lumber at their feet, tool belts on their hips. The shriek of a red hand-held horn rang out at 8 a.m. sharp, and the air thickened with sawdust and hummed with drills and saws.
Within minutes, the Belton team had a big problem: All around them framing began to rise, but not theirs.
Jack needed to cut the wood for the framing, but always a perfectionist, he measured and measured again (and sometimes again) before each cut. At 9:37 a.m., with only a corner piece of wall up, they stopped and took stock, whispering in a huddle about what they had to do to win. Without ever discussing it, they came to an agreement about what they had to stop doing to win: No more jostling to outdo one another. Time was the true adversary.
The judges, with measuring tape and notepads, circled the team’s station, tallying progress in inches and angles, an unnerving reminder that each decision counted toward the final score. The judges were looking for an accurate execution of the blueprint with clean lines and correct measurements. Once the roofs started to rise, one judge said, it would become clear which teams had a shot at victory and which ones would never finish.
At 9:52, Bryson and Jack heaved up a wall, holding it in place while Joseph drilled the screws. After months of perfecting hammering a nail in a single blow, they’d learned the day before that this build would use only screws. In a span of 40 minutes, three more walls rose.
By lunchtime, Belton had the basic structure built. By 1 p.m., Erik was installing the electrical panel and outlet boxes. They were among six teams that were “in good shape,” said one judge.
After the horn ended the first day of the competition, Carillo, who had spent the day on the sidelines, arms folded across his chest, worried the team was behind on the roof. Bryson was nervous about the sharply angled corner that would finish the small brick wall. To create corner, several pieces would need to be chiseled at sharp angles, a task difficult to complete without a brick saw.
Carillo drove the team to Lowe’s to buy bricks and a chisel so that Bryson could practice. As the sun set, Bryson crouched on the sparse parking lot behind the hotel with the mason from the Texas State Technical College’s team, which was competing at the college level. Bryson was trying to break the top of the brick at an angle without shattering it. As the two of them struggled, a light drizzle began to fall. Without any cover, they kept at it.
Brotherhood and Sawdust
Day two would be, as one judge put it, where the wheat separated from the chaff. By midmorning, the air smelled of butane and mortar. Only a few teams would finish, and it was not clear if Belton would be among them. Carillo had told the team that they needed to finish by 3 p.m. — an hour before the competition ended — to ensure they had enough time to fix mistakes.
Joseph, lying under the house, installed the waterline, and kept track of the time with a watch he’d bought at Walmart just for the competition. By 1 p.m., the team’s to-do list was long and the time short — the window awning had no shingles, the wall no siding, and there were only three hours left. When Jack asked Joseph for an update, he was stunned that another hour had passed. How had the minutes evaporated?
Bryson had planned to finish his brick wall by 2 to help Jack build the stairs, a two-man job, but the angled pieces were vexing. The bricks kept crumbling in his hands. The parking lot practice seemed for naught. Joseph, who was now filling in for Bryson, shifted gears to help Jack.
They were shaken, and Erik, rushing, tried to climb a step that Joseph was still building. He tripped, and for a fleeting moment, he thought he might fall, but Joseph caught him. Relieved, Erik turned back to his electrical work. He was short wiring nuts, and didn’t know what to do about the pigtail wiring that needed to be closed off. Should he just leave it?
With 30 minutes left, at 3:30 p.m., the stairs were installed, but the treads were too short — Jack had grabbed the wrong size lumber and by the time he realized his mistake, he’d already marked the wood to cut. Joseph made the call to keep going rather than start over and lose time. Bryson shattered his last remaining brick, ending his chances of chiseling the corner. The team diagonally across from theirs, from Central Pennsylvania, was nearly finished.
By 3:45, their fans had gathered by the sidelines. “I’m about to throw up,” Claudia Knox, the school principal, said. Carillo, knowing the team had blown its personal deadline, could see victory slipping away.
Then, seemingly all at once, the boys attached the siding and the shingles, and with eight minutes to spare, they finished.
Bryson stepped back to admire his work, shrugging off the missing corner — no team figured out how to do it correctly. “It’s still the best wall I’ve ever done,” he said. Joseph passed his plumbing test, but he’d made a glaring error: He’d misread the blueprint and installed the supply lines for the shower 16 inches apart, not eight. He hoped the mistake wouldn’t cost the team too many points. Erik hoped the judges wouldn’t ding him for the missing wing nuts on his outlet boxes.
But only five high school teams had completed their tiny house. “You can’t win if you don’t finish,” Erik said.
Jack showed Carillo a cut on his hand. “I filled it with sawdust,” he said proudly. Carillo pointed out the scars lacing his own arms. “You see, that’s part of the brotherhood,” he said. “You’re part of the club now.”
‘Let’s Go’
First place was the only place that mattered to the Belton team, who wore red blazers with the SkillsUSA logo and 10-gallon hats to the awards ceremony. They had made a pact to only celebrate if they were No. 1.
As they waited to hear the finalists, their mood shifted from glee to dread. “All because of the stairs we’re not going to go up there,” Joseph said to Jack.
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, an announcer said. The state names suddenly appeared on the Jumbotron.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” shouted Carillo, bouncing from his seat. The boys, tossing their hats aside, rushed to get to the stage. Passing a phone around to use as a mirror, they fixed their hair. Joseph reminded them: Smile only for gold.
“Michigan.” The announcer called Bay-Arenac ISD in Bay City for the bronze medal.
Erik’s heart beat heavy in his chest. Bryson and Jack thought about that extra wall the Pennsylvania team had built. How could they possibly win with such a mistake? Joseph still had a sinking feeling about the stairs.
“Texas,” the announcer said. Belton had taken silver.
A flicker of disappointment crossed Carillo’s face, before he replaced it with a smile. “It’s hard,” he said. “It’s hard to win here.”
Jack, head down, kicked the floor with his boot. Was it the stairs that cost them? Did the Pennsylvania students, from SUN Area Technical Institute in New Berlin, practice more? Bryson didn’t mince words: “I wanted to be first.”
Joseph twisted his mouth, as he did whenever he was considering a problem. “It stings,” he said, “you’re right there.”
He would go home to Belton to his first job — working as a plumber’s apprentice.
Ronda Kaysen, a real estate reporter for The Times, writes about the intersection of housing and society.
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