DECATUR - Keith Cusey would rather not talk about himself.

Still, it's not every day that a guy places second out of 138 in a national welding competition. The occasion was the American Welding Society show in Chicago, and the task was to weld a piece of steel plate to a pipe at a 45-degree angle overhead in five minutes or less.

"A woman won first place," Cusey observed with a grin, "and my students give me a hard time about it and say I was 'beat by a girl.' "

The students are studying welding under Cusey at the Decatur Area Technical Academy, and they'll have to compete in a student-level contest in the spring. Cusey asks his students to do that every year, and when this professional competition came to his attention, he figured he ought to prove his own mettle, considering he asks the students to do so.

"He didn't have to do this," said Tim Murrell, director of the tech academy. "He did it on his own time."

Cusey has been in welding for 22 years and calls the profession "competitive," even during the course of normal work. He has about 28 students in his classes this year, down from 34 last year. He said that may be due to the recession and fewer welding jobs available.

Last year, four students went on to college at Midwest Technical Institute, something Cusey was glad to see. The time they spend in higher education will not only make better welders out of them but give the market time to recover so that more jobs will be available by the time they go looking for work, he said.

"What I have here is a skill-based lesson plan to where I have some kids who have natural hand-eye coordination, and I feed off that," he said. "If I show them a weld, and they get it, then I test them on it and move them on. The more things I can show them, the better they'll be and the more marketable they'll be."

A welder should be competitive, detail-oriented, artistic - Cusey said his best students are often good at drawing, too - and maybe most importantly, they don't settle for "that's good enough."

Neither does Cusey, Murrell said.

"It's not just the students, it's not just the administration, but our instructors do a lot of work and are very well-prepared as well," Murrell said. "One of the things that impresses me about the welding program in particular is, I go in and ask the students, 'What are you working on?' and they'll show me a project they have, and it brings together all the tools that anybody needs to do a job like that really well. The math, the design, then they have to put it together."

vwells@herald-review.com|421-7982