![]() ![]() ![]() Then last year I took the second part to that engineering class and then it kind of just carried ever since.” “So then freshman year I came and took an engineering design class and then we looked up different fields of engineering and that’s when I kind of fell into the mechanical engineering part. “Then going into my fifth grade year, that’s when like I fell in love with math, and then going into seventh grade that’s when you had to look at careers and all that and then I realized that math is like a huge part of engineering,” Patterson says. Patterson stepped foot on dozens of college campuses throughout his recruitment, but the mini-metropolis in southwest Virginia won him over immediately by tailoring his visit to his passion, an itch he first started scratching at the age of 5 when, according to his parents, he would take toys apart and put them back together for fun. This is how Justin Fuente’s program landed the Southside prodigy, after all, beating out the likes of Penn State, North Carolina and many others. This is the world he envisions for himself next year at Virginia Tech, the school for which he will sign his national letter of intent Wednesday, and it is a world that the Hokies are happy to accommodate. This is the world of Patterson, Solorio Academy’s 6-foot-2, 230-pound mechanical engineer geek who doubles as a four-star dual-threat quarterback. “It was similar to a triathlon where one of them was a speed race, one of them was an obstacle course and one of them was a dive-ring retrieval where they had to go underwater, had to use a robot to pick up a bunch of stuff off the bottom of the pool and bring it back to the surface.” “They blew away the competition with their robot,” adds engineering design teacher Robert Payne, speaking of Patterson’s group. We had like hula hoops at the bottom of the pool and you had to maneuver the robots to them. “Underwater robots,” Patterson clarifies. Matt Erlenbaugh, Patterson’s head football coach, has another in mind - an off-field assignment, actually: “I would say when I was watching him doing the submarine things in the pool and stuff.”
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