2 COMMUNITY
From left, the four Mopar CAP students who represented MCC in the 2025 Mopar CAP Bracket Challenge: Nathan Kraemer, Connor Jensen, Daniel Grabowski and Nick Smith.
VICTORY LAP:
MCC Mopar CAP brings home national championship from Motor City On a cloudy January day, students in the Mopar Career Automotive Program (CAP) patiently waited for the delivery of their traveling trophy. The arrival of the limited-edition 2018 Dodge Challenger Demon, an 800-plus-horsepower muscle machine, is a fitting memento to the speed and grit that has built one of the nation’s leading Mopar CAP programs in just three years. The MCC Mopar CAP program is part of a nationwide effort by Mopar to train and employ entry-level automotive technicians for Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and Ram dealerships. For the second consecutive year, MCC was selected to compete in the Mopar CAP Bracket Challenge, which brings together Mopar CAP partner schools throughout the country to participate in friendly technical and curriculum-based competitions. After a loss in the 2024 semifinals, the 2025 team persevered to emerge as the national champion in December. The team narrowly defeated Eastern Maine Community College (Bangor, Maine) in the finals at the Mopar National Tech Training Center in Auburn Hills, Mich., completing four rounds of competition that spanned two months.
The Demon is displayed in the showroom of the Automotive Training Center on the South Omaha Campus until the next Bracket Challenge champion is crowned. Just making it into the bracket is a tremendous accomplishment — only 16 of the nearly 100 schools with Mopar programming are eligible based on employment outcomes. Because of the program’s structure, which includes a rotating schedule between classes on the South Omaha Campus and on-the-job training at a dealership, MCC was already set up for success. Since the program started at MCC in 2023, it has maintained a 100% employment rate among student cohorts for each year of operation. “[MCC Mopar CAP instructors] have really good relationships with dealerships, so we were all able to work in an actual dealership, which really helped us in the beginning rounds,” said Nathan Kraemer, one of the four MCC student competitors selected to represent the 16-member team in the competition. Kraemer received his on-the-job experience at Sid Dillon Lincoln.