“America’s Got Talent” is one of America’s popular talent shows, but VHHS has talent of it’s own.The DJ, the impersonator, the ice skater; what’s one thing they all have in common? These talented students (Trevor Moyers, Maddie Powder, and Tom Tinetti) all go to VHHS.

Trevor Moyers (12): Impersonations

Distinguishable voices like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Morgan Freeman, Elmo, and SpongeBob can be easy impersonations. For Trevor Moyers, these are especially basic because he can do much more difficult ones–the best of which is popular Lord of the Rings character Gollum. Moyers has been performing impersonations for as long as he remembers, and he said he’s always been good with voice work. His interest in impersonations started because he thought they are pretty funny if done right.

“It just comes natural to me, really,” he said.

Although Moyers performed his impersonations last year at Vernon Hills Live, he mainly performs them in front of his friends at the right moments like during movies and, occasionally, during class. For most people, learning an impersonation can take quite a while, but for Moyers it only takes a couple of seconds: he just needs to think of a line of dialogue for the character, and then he’s set.

Maddie Powder (11): Ice Skating

Figure eights and spread turns are ice skating tricks Maddie Powder loves to perform. She has been skating since she was six years old, and a part of a synchronized team since she was eight.

“I started because my preschool offered a class at a local rink. My parents forced me to join a synchro team, and I was super mad about it, but now I’m so happy I did,” Powder said.

Some of the best tricks she can perform are the spread eagle, broken leg spin, and death spiral. To master these tricks, Powder practices every day for around two to three hours.

“I love any [ice skater] that knows how to perform and get the audience involved,” she said. Powder also looks up to her coach, who besides being a great skater, also works at Google, and she admires the combination of her coach’s interest and careers.

Being on a synchronized team means participating in competitions, and Powder performs in various competitions from November through March. As well as a qualifying competition in January, there are Nationals and Junior Worlds for the top two teams.

Tom Tinetti (12): DJ-ing/Music Production

One thing you can find Tom Tinetti (12) doing is producing music and turning tables. Since 7th grade Tinetti has been producing music, and he’s been DJ-ing since he was 16.

“It’s very hard to be like, ‘Oh, my talent is DJ-ing, because realistically anyone can DJ, so I don’t really consider it a talent,” Tinetti said, “What I consider a talent is music productions which is really making the actual music for a lot of EDM tracks: those dance tracks made off a computer and  that’s what I do.”At first he was just creating basic songs. But as time went on he wasn’t as satisfied with these songs and idea came to mind.

“As junior year started coming along, I wanted to write a full album, a full collection of these songs and I finished my album over the summer going into junior year and that was probably the biggest thing I’ve worked on,” Tinetti said. Although he’s started over a thousand songs, only about 80 have actually been finished because he works three to five hours a day and he said it really depends on his motivation.

His talent for producing and DJ-ing started with his growing interest in electronic music in middle school and just playing around with a producing program. From there, he was able to determine what he really wanted to do later on life, which is to be a music teacher.

One of the bigger influences for him is the band Daft Punk because he feels they really helped make electronic music a mainstream success. Tinetti hasn’t done many performances besides school assemblies, but he has reached a stage where he would really like to perform more at dances and other popular events.