From April 10 to 12, GHS’ FBLA team took to the road and went to Kearney to participate in a statewide competition. In total, they took 12 people on the trip. Ten people either placed or got an honorable mention award, and five are now going on to compete at the FBLA national competition in Anaheim, California, over the summer.
“I was pretty excited. I was pretty proud of the team. I think we all did pretty good as a whole, and I’m excited to see a couple of our guys go to nationals this year,” said junior Kelsey Van Waart.
The FBLA state competition is exactly what a person would expect it to be. It’s the last competition of the season for most, meaning there’s added pressure to do well and accomplish any goals that still haven’t happened yet that season. Since it is the state competition, though, the team competed against the best of the best from across the state to make the podium.
“It involves any school that wants to send students in the state, so I feel like there’s a few thousand (students) out of Nebraska that go to State and compete in a variety of different topics around 50-100 events,” said FBLA sponsor Christine Swantek.
Even with all the tough competition gathered in Kearney, the team still put many GHS FBLA members on the podium. Van Waart brought home seventh in marketing in a group presentation with Brady Donahue and Caleb Haecker, while placing eighth individually in Public Speaking and Honorable Mention in Business Law. Junior Caleb Larsen also did very well by placing sixth in Public Policy and Advocacy, seventh in Financial Math and Honorable Mention in Healthcare Administration. The peak of the day, though, was when the group of Donahue, Larsen and Ronnie Rassette brought home second place in Data Analysis.
“They are given some information, a topic, and in this case, they were given data on pollution, and then they had to present what they would do, how they would handle it, ” Swantek said. “New event. They just decided, ‘Let’s try this one,’ and they did very well.”
After three long days of competition, Gretna brought home a total of 13 awards, improving significantly from past years.
“I think we were pretty proud as a group. We’re excited to send some students to nationals in Anaheim, California this year, so just being able to know that we have some national qualifiers is pretty exciting, but also a lot of state awards were achieved throughout the week, so that was pretty exciting,” Van Waart said.
Even though this year has been wrapped up for many involved and seniors are leaving the group, the team aims to build a program that involves freshmen and sophomores more and gets people excited.
“We’re hoping to get younger freshmen, sophomores in it, involved and possibly doing more just to get more people involved, because it is hard to take a lot of people to competitions, so we want to get people involved in other areas of it,” Haecker said.
