USU Questival: ‘Dare mighty things’
Utah State University students finished Business Week on Friday with a bang as they cinched up their Cotopaxi backpacks and headed out on a 24-hour adventure scavenger hunt.
“It’s amazing how much fun and the amount of good you can do with your friends in such a short amount of time,” said Brenton Hull, a junior who was in the group to place first in the Questival.
The Questival is an event sponsored and organized by Cotopaxi, an outdoor gear company. Cotopaxi hosts 12 different Questivals throughout the year in 12 different states. After business senator Ben Vera competed in Utah’s April Questival, he decided that it would be a good idea to bring the adventure to USU.
“I started speaking with Cotopaxi about doing a questival with the John M. Huntsman School of Business around the end of May,” Vera said. “They were really excited about it and thought it was a good idea to get their name up here in Cache Valley.”
The Questival began late Friday afternoon with a kick-off party on the quad. Teams arrived with packs of outdoor gear and plenty of Aggie energy. Each participant received a free Cotopaxi backpack and prepped for the race with pre-game tasks: beer pong, food trucks and yard games. After a short pump-up shout, teams of two to six people set out on a race to see who could complete the most outdoor tasks in the next 24 hours.
“To kick off the party our team drove straight to Salt Lake,” said Jordan Rule, a freshman at USU. “We downed the Red Bulls and the Sour Patch Kids and we were on our way. It was honestly so great until those two Red Bulls caught up to me.”
Throughout the race, teams used the Questival app to decide on which tasks they would complete. The app was organized into 12 categories of tasks: food, quirky, service and environment, social media, surprise, survival and camping, teamwork, travel and hiking, adventure and fitness, checkpoints, community and festival.
The team that completed the most tasks and had the highest creativity ranking could win a trip to Belize to compete in the world Questival.
“My favorite task was wakeboarding at 7:30 in the morning at Bear Lake,” Hull said. “It was a moment of relief and a moment of extreme pleasure.”
Hull’s team had competed in the April Questival and said that the main difference was that this race, the tasks were more centered around Cache Valley. He also liked the tasks that tested their knowledge on the school of business.
“Some of the tasks require students to search for Huntsman facts, and a surprise task was to stop and spell out Huntsman with whatever teams could find,” Vera said.
To complete tasks, teams had to take a picture or video of them doing the task and submit the picture to the Questival app for judges review. To further marketing for Cotopaxi, the judges required each team to include a flag with the company logo in pictures.
Vera said that from a business perspective, Cotopaxi Questival is very impressive and is a great example to students aspiring to be entrepreneurs.
“Our motto in the business school is dare mighty things, and the founders and chief officers of Cotopaxi have dared mighty things in their career paths,” Vera said.
The company is very focused on giving back to the community and each year uses the majority of their funds to alleviate poverty.
“The Cotopaxi company incorporates an idealistic kind of business that does well because it gives back,” Hull said.
Questival reflects this attitude of selflessness in the service tasks. Hull said he liked how during the rush to win, his team helped lay sod for a new park at the Cache Valley Humane Society and visited senior citizens in the Legacy Home.
“It was a weekend well-spent to the extreme,” Hull said. “The Questival helped me realize how much you can do if you put your time and effort into it. There is good to be done and had everywhere.”
— kayla1swenson@gmail.com