BPA students win national championship

By Jonathan Starkey
Staff Reporter

	Coastal Point • SUBMITTED From left, Craig Conover, Tom Jurusik and Chad Brasure pose with the trophy earned in Orlando, Fla.

Earlier this month, 48 teams from across the country competed in small business management competition at the Business Professionals of America’s (BPA) national championships in Orlando, Fla.

While sitting at the awards ceremony after the four-day competition, 47 of those teams were left wondering where Dagsboro, Del., is located. They may be more familiar with the small Delaware town now. Less than a month after winning the state championship in the same category, a four-member team from Indian River High School won the national championship in the small-business category at the Orlando finals.

“We were surprised we got to the finals,” said Chad Brasure, one member of the team of Indian River business students. “We walked out of (preliminaries) feeling that we should just take the rest of the trip to relax.”

After walking out of their final performance, Brasure and teammates Craig Conover, Tom Jurusik and Tyler Hastings felt quite differently.

“I knew that we placed top 10,” Jurusik said. “We didn’t know that we made number one.”

In the state and national competitions, the students had to use information learned in business classes at Indian River to serve as fictional consultants for small businesses. In the national finals, for instance, they had 90 minutes to analyze invoices for a small company looking to extend their business by the way of the Internet and present their findings and recommendations on possible options to a judging panel.

“It’s all spur-of-the-moment,” Conover said.

All four national champs learned much of the information used to earn that championship in business classes taught by Bennett Murray, Indian River’s BPA advisor and business department chairman.

Murray, a University of Delaware graduate, worked in the banking industry in Wilmington and at Banks Company in this area before taking a teaching job in 2001.

At Indian River, he teaches accounting, marketing and entrepreneurship.

“It helps the kids out a lot,” Murray said of his professional business experience. “I can real-life them. There’s nothing worse than someone lecturing and teaching out of the book.”

His students agreed. Conover, who is heading to the College of Charleston in the fall to study marketing, has been influenced by Murray’s classes and the BPA program at the school for three years.

”We just looked at this as a good opportunity,” he said. “It’s kind of real-world experience.”

Not only Conover, but two other members of the team will pursue more experience, studying business at college next year. While Hastings plans to study medicine at Tulane University, Jurusik and Brasure intend to study international business at the University of South Carolina.

“I’m just fascinated by the business world,” Jurusik said, summing up the team members’ beliefs on the subject.

Interestingly, Jurusik and Brasure started taking business classes at the school just this year. Those classes, the BPA program and Murray have certainly had their impact.

“I bring the world into the classroom,” Murray said. “Seventy percent of people take business in college. Wouldn’t it be better to get a taste of that here?”

Roach takes ninth place

A junior who has been involved in Indian River’s BPA program for three years took ninth place among more than 100 competitors in the national payroll accounting competition.

“I knew I did my best but I didn’t think I did that well,” Kara Roach said. “I was surprised.”

Murray said that most students become involved in BPA later in their high school experience, when they have more time to do so. Roach, therefore, is a rarity, he said. The state winner, who took 17th place in last year’s national championship, should have a bright future.