“I feel cool, calm, and collected,” Cutshall, 27, said from her hotel room. “I feel pretty confident, too. I’ve got my coaches here with me.”

Cutshall is among only 10 apprentices from different parts of the country to reach the National Championship through a multistage competition that began in May. She made the finals Thursday by correctly diagnosing a refrigerant charge issue, “which is something I do every day” on the job, she said.

The task awaiting Cutshall and four other apprentice finalists on Friday afternoon hadn’t yet been revealed, the mystery adding to the challenge. Last year, she and other finalists each had 90 minutes to install an air handler and a filter cabinet and use sheet metal to build a plenum with two runs coming off of it.

“We’re very patiently waiting to find out what we’re doing today,” Cutshall said. 

Jason Nygren, training manager at The SEER Group and an instructor at the SEER Training Institute, said Cutshall has the smarts, skill, and determination to win. Columbia NW Heating & Air Conditioning is part of The SEER Group.

“She’s determined,” said Nygren, who was in West Palm Beach on Friday to support Cutshall. “She’s just very driven. She has, obviously, what I would say is an extremely high intelligence level.”

She also motivates other technicians to do their best, Nygren said, recalling the time, a couple of years back, when Cutshall led study sessions in a hotel lobby to help herself and other trainees prepare for an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) certification test.

As a woman in a trade dominated by men — only 3% of the nation’s HVAC technicians are women, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Cutshall has no chip on her shoulder, Nygren said.

“She views herself as a technician, and she wants to be the best technician,” he said.

Nygren and another SEER instructor, Robb Bunch, helped prepare Cutshall for the National Championship recently during a couple of days of intensive training. “We just kind of threw everything HVAC at her,” Nygren said.

“This is a big deal. Real competition,” he added. “I think there’s prep work that needs to go into it, not just your daily job.”

Cutshall, after high school, started studying chemistry in college with the thought of later going to medical school. But, looking back at positive experiences in high school metal shop classes and a shop teacher who had recommended she go into a trade, plus encouragement from her brother, she switched to HVAC.

Cutshall said she likes working with both her hands and her mind.

“I find it’s a little harder to burn out, just because every day is different,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed science, and HVAC is a pretty scientific field.”

The top prize for the overall apprentice winner in the National Championship is $20,000. Cutshall, an avid backpacker, said she’d use the winnings for a hiking trip in the Dolomite Mountains, which are in northeastern Italy. “What drives me is going to pretty places,” she said.

Cutshall needs to put in a couple more years as an apprentice before applying for a journeyman’s license. Eventually, she said, she’d like to become an HVAC instructor. She recently returned to her high school to speak to students about HVAC.

“I think it’d be really cool to try to get more kids just to understand that HVAC is something they could go into as well,” she said.