Niles West DECA Succeeds in Area Competition

Niles West’s DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) team participated in the 2023 Area competition held at Donald E. Stephens Convention Center. They had 24 overall event placers 10 test placers, and 36 role-play placers. The team left the school at 6:30 a.m. and came back by 2:10 p.m. on Jan. 18.

DECA’s competitive events consist of three categories; role-plays and case studies, prepared events and online simulations. In each category, DECA has four career clusters including marketing, finance, hospitality and management. It also includes entrepreneurship and personal financial literacy. This particular tournament was a role-play event. 

Participants started off with a business related prompt that they had to make decisions about based on their role in the scenario. They were then given eight minutes to prepare, and depending on what cluster and how large the group was, eight to twelve minutes to present.

New member Mysha Kazi was especially excited about her first DECA competition.

“I was really calm because I knew I probably wasn’t going to win, so I just wanted the experience. But since I’m going to state I felt like I learned a lot from this competition. And that I can incorporate what I’ve learned into what I say during state,” Kazi said.

DECA member Aisha Saleem placed second in a human resource management role-play, and felt that this year’s competition exceeded her expectations.

“I expected it to be very fun and challenging. I liked it because it was fun, you get to meet a lot of different people, and you learn a lot,” Saleem said.

DECA sponsor and advisor Tricia Brown was very thrilled with how well DECA did in this competition. “For a lot of students, it was the first time participating in a DECA business competition so … they learned the exact process of how to compete with DECA, and then other students were focused on kind of honing their skills and mastering their problem solving abilities. Comparatively, last year the DECA team did outstanding. So, this year we had 36 students medaled at Area and last year was the post-Covid year and it was kind of a rebuilding year for DECA having a pause for the one year and we’re really looking forward to taking almost 60 students to state and hopefully qualifying a lot of them to nationals.”

DECA state will be on March 2-4 at Hyatt Regency in Rosemont. The competition will have both the test and role-play in the same week.