On Wednesday, January 6, 2016 students involved in DECA went to a competition at the Crowne Plaza in Cherry Hill to compete for regional titles in business role play. In order to go to regionals, students had to take an online test after school. At CHS, junior Brad Miller ended up getting first place on the exam, followed by senior Brian Cook.

At the regional competition, students were each assigned a role-play scenario. They received ten minutes prior to the event to prepare a technique/plan, and then ten minutes with the judge to prove that they were the best candidate for the situation. Such situations consisted of being the manager of a hotel, to dealing with an emergency crisis.

Seniors Michael Reid and Dom Baratta are two-time qualifiers for states. This year, their situation role play dealt with, “How I was going to fix an amusement parks image after one of the roller coasters had a malfunction and hurt someone… we had to figure out how to make the park look good again to the public,” explained Reid.

The event lasted from 8 a.m-5 p.m, and students had to wait until the evening to hear the results of the evening, and receive their awards.

The down side to the day-long competition was that, “It got boring around mid-afternoon, because we were waiting around all day,” according to junior Emily McDevitt.

Although most students had to think on their feet with only a few minutes to prepare, senior Annie Pietrzak had a different category than anyone from CHS. Her category was professional selling, so she had to bring in materials for a sales pitch to the judges. Annie, along with seniors Kayla Peterson and Ryan Devone, qualified for the state competition later on.

Along with the names listed above, 18 other CHS students qualified for states. Some of those qualifiers were seniors Dom Baratta and Mike Reid, Annie Pietrzak, Andrew Greene, Kayla peterson, Marina Urban, junior KC Fedorko, and sophomore Ryan Teague. These are only a handful of the many students that qualified for the states competition.

Overall, students had nothing but positive things to say about the competition as a whole. Kayla Peterson credited her teachers claiming that, “We have to really thank Mrs. Neuman, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Perekupka, because without them we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”