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Cheryl Pokorny has proved herself as a handyman around her Mount Airy home. She's built the shed in her backyard, the steps leading up to her front door, and completed countless improvements inside.

But whether she is an "All American Handyman" has yet to be proved.

Pokorny, who works as a physical education teacher at Magruder High School in Rockville, competed on the HGTV reality show. In its second season, the program showcases nonprofessional handymen who compete for a $10,000 prize package and an HGTV development deal.

"It's people with normal jobs, that's the premise," said Pokorny's friend Val Lowe, a Mount Airy resident who has seen the show and helped Pokorny film her video submission. "They're not professional."

HGTV's celebrity judges Mike Holmes and Scott McGillivray, along with a rotating third evaluator, judged the 20 competitors involved, both seasons involving 15 men and five women.

Pokorny watched the show last season and found the female competitor's skill set to be lacking.

"I want to represent women with a decent skill set," she said. "That's my real goal, to represent women ... go ahead and get the hammer, hang the picture, don't be afraid to ask questions and learn on your own."

In October, she applied to the competition completing a 25-page form and creating a five-minute audition video.

It wasn't until March Pokorny learned that out of 8,000 people, she was one to make the "short list" and was asked to answer further questions — 30 pages and a phone interview. She even included her enthused students in the process.

A couple weeks later she got an email that she was "in" and filming would start a week later in New York City.

Serendipitously filming worked with Pokorny's spring break and with an understanding school principal and a few vacation days, she headed to the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard for filming of the six-episode show, where every challenge eliminates more than one competitor.

Pokorny said the schedule was grueling.

"It was kind of like ‘Survivor Handyman,'" she laughed. The group would be on set filming a challenge at 3 a.m., then turn around, do "interviews" in the hotel, and that didn't include waiting for judge's deliberations and filming.

"If you got three hours of sleep a night, you were doing good," she said.

It wasn't just the building but that the projects were fast and timed, the "element of real difficulty," Lowe said. "It was the pressure element and the stamina."

Cameras also were in contestants' faces constantly.

"It's not just building things," Pokorny said. "When I watched the first season I thought, ‘That's so easy'... [but it's not] it's nerve-wracking."

Fix-it skills always have been a part of Pokorny's life, growing up with a handyman dad. "I was kind of his little helper," she said.

And as she got older, the homes she could afford often were fixer-uppers.

"I learned as I went," she said. "I couldn't afford to hire contractors, so I just learned things: looking at books, videos, TV shows ... trial and error, that's kind of how it worked."

Her current home off of Penn Shop Road in Mount Airy was a project in itself.

"My neighbors all thought I was crazy," she said when she purchased her fixer-upper home. "I just saw it and thought ‘Wow, look at the potential of this place.'"

By doing her own work, she not only saved money but avoided the stress of coordinating ideas with a contractor, and some friends have even had her do work because of her "meticulous" nature with it.

"Women can do this kind of stuff," said Pokorny, who also runs an acupuncture business on the side. "We don't have to be relying on men to do this stuff, just like they shouldn't only rely on women for cooking."

Pokorny couldn't update family and friends much while filming, and is mum on the outcome of the show. The show is set to run in September, and she said she'll probably have a party when it airs.

"All-American Handyman" airs on HGTV at 9 p.m. Sundays. To learn more, visit www.hgtv.com.

acochrun@gazette.net