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Construction management students win big in Las Vegas

When 12 Sacramento State engineering students went to Las Vegas they gambled that their design and construction ideas would impress the judges at the 89th annual Associated General Contractors of America and Associated Schools of Construction National Competition.

Their gamble paid off, and both six-person teams from the College of Engineering and Computer Science’s Construction Management Department walked away with first-place finishes in the competition March 11. One team placed first in the Commercial Building Division and the other placed first in the Design-Build Division.

“I’m very proud of our students. It’s remarkable how much good information they produced in a very short time,” says Keith Bisharat, program coordinator for the department. “They worked as a team and no one wanted to let the others, or the school, down.” 

During the competition, 21 teams from around the country were critiqued on estimating, bidding, planning, scheduling, presentation skills, creativity, understanding of sound construction techniques and thoughtful methodology throughout a two–day simulated construction project.

The design-build team was given a request for proposal for a $34.2 million, 70,000-square foot humanities building on the UC Irvine campus. “We received it at 6 a.m. and worked for 18 hours straight to produce a building design and construction management plan. It was a pretty brutal schedule but we got ours in first and it was in a half hour before it was due,” says Isaac Dye, senior construction management student

The commercial building team’s project included the construction of an aquarium in Seattle with a pier/pile foundation located over a body of water. Work included selective demolition of an existing structure as well as new construction of the aquarium itself. 

“We had a lot of logistical issues to overcome such as where things would be stored, how to proceed safely and how to set up without interrupting the flow of business to the aquarium, which was still open,” says Cliff Moore, senior construction management student. “We looked at the proposal and the drawings for about four hours trying to figure out what we were going to do.”

In addition to the proposal, each team gave a presentation in front of a panel of judges.

“All the leg work is in the written proposal but the presentation has to be complete and comprehensive and meet the design request of the request for proposal,” says Dye. “Taken together, it was weeks of work crammed into one day.”

The Sacramento State teams made it to the national competition after claiming three first-place finishes in the Western regional competition in Sparks, Nevada Feb. 14-16. There, Sacramento State students took first in the Design-Build Construction Competition, the Mechanical Competition and the Commercial Building Competition, beating out schools in the Western region. 

Sacramento State actually won three national construction management championships. The mechanical team won the Mechanical Division national title during the competition at Sparks in February. 

The teams were sponsored by the Sacramento Construction Management Education Foundation and coached by faculty in the Construction Management Department and members of local construction companies.

The build-design team members include Dye, Matt Burnie, Ryan Sutton-Gee, Tracy Young, Hitesh Dewan and Carl Arevalo.

The construction team members include Moore, Phillip Wonders, Jonathan Cardin, Ryan Shope, Tyler Gahagan and Vanessa Guerra.

The mechanical team members include Chris Cormier, Eddy Deniz, Kyle Gray, Garrett McGuken, Patrick McGuirk, Matt Moore and CJ Zelnick.

 For more information about the competition, contact the College of Engineering and Computer Science’s Construction Management Program at (916) 278-6616.