By SALINA POST
The Kansas Wesleyan University DECA team's recent trip to Baltimore for the Collegiate DECA International Career Development Conference and competition proved to be quite successful, so much so that the KWU students returned to Salina as the most successful team at the conference.
The KWU team members competed against more than 800 other students from more than 100 other institutions during the conference April 9-12.
In its fifth year of competition, KWU was not only victorious over colleges and universities of similar size, but it also was victorious over such institutions as Pepperdine University, DePaul University, University of Texas, Rutgers University, and The University of Wisconsin, according to Trish Petak, KWU associate professor of business and accounting.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, most international teams did not attend the conference and competition, however some teams from England were present.
Petak explained that DECA is a business competition in which students select event topics that include business ethics, marketing communication, and financial accounting. The students are presented cases that contain problems or opportunities within those specialized areas. Students are then given a set amount of time to prepare solutions and present those solutions to judges.
According to Petak, 100 percent of KWU's 14 team members finished in the Top 10 of their respective events. Six of the team members placed second and two were crowned world champions, she said.
Michelle Case, who is in her first year as chair of the Business and Accounting Department, said that she was in awe of what the team accomplished this year.
The students' success, in part, was in response to a challenge Petak issued to the team earlier in the year. She told them that "if we simply follow the DECA rubric provided to the judge, we are ordinary; you need to do something extra to make you extraordinary." The team took that to heart and it guided them through a successful competition season.
Petak also noted that the team was the department's team, and praised her colleagues for the work they do in the classroom with the students.
Following are the KWU Top 10 finishers and winners as provided by Petak.
First Place: Ryann Kats and Emily Monson - Business-to-Business Marketing
Second Place: Maddy Beckett and Alexis Utz - Event Planning
Second Place: Karley Benson - Food and Restaurant Service Management
Second Place: Trey Duffey and Connor Waltz - Sports and Entertainment Marketing
Second Place: Brian Nelson - Managerial Accounting
Other KWU students who finished in the Top 10 are as follows.
Cameron Becker and Matthew Freriks - Sports and Entertainment Marketing
Courtney Beers and Linda Himes - International Marketing
Taylor Lang - Human Resource Management
Paige Welk - Sales Management Meeting