HR team wins region for 7th year
Seven is a special number for the human resource department in the Jon M. Hunstman School of Business.
For the seventh straight year, a USU team claimed both the state and regional human resource competition titles, making USU the only university in the nation to claim such an honor, said Al Warnick, head of the human resource department and team coach.
The regional human resource competition, sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management, was held in San Antonio, Texas, as part of a two-day conference and competition, where teams from the nine-state region competed for the title. USU had two teams compete, which placed first and second in the state competition. The winning team was comprised of team captain Jenn Wyatt, senior in human resource management and management information systems, Stacey Peterson, senior in human resource management, and Kortney Teigen, who graduated in December in management and human resources.
The other USU team, which placed third in the regional competition, was made up of Mike Westin, senior majoring in operations management and human resources, Devin Hirschi, senior majoring in human resources, and Preston Chandler, who graduated December in operations management, management and human resources and statistics.
“These students are awesome,” Warnick said. “Not only are these our best and brightest students, but they are just great people. They really are. I’m as proud of them as I can be.”
The competition, which is played in a Jeopardy-style format, pitted 15 teams against each other to clear the board in 15 minutes, Warnick said. In the final match, USU faced a tough Kansas State team that had a 3500-point advantage after the first board of the two-board championship match. With USU’s regional winning streak on the line, Peterson said the pressure was on.
“It’s the final round, everybody who’s lost and is not in the final round, they’re watching you. (We’ve) won six or seven years in a row, and you’re sitting there going, ‘We can’t get beat by Kansas,’ because everybody is watching,” she said.
The second board played to USU’s favor as Wyatt correctly answered an entire section about the Occupational, Safety and Health Administration, to put USU up, Wyatt said. With three questions left to go, Peterson answered a question about religious discrimination to seal the deal for USU, though she didn’t know how crucial her answer was at the time.
“I’m glad I realized, that it didn’t go to my head before, that if I answered that question right it would seal it because I would have got too scared and run out of time,” Peterson said.
With two questions still on the board, Wyatt said she knew her team had won because even if Kansas State answered those questions correctly, they still would have been down 100 points.
Carrie Belsito, a coach for the team, said the members of the team seemed calm the whole time, but couldn’t help expressing a moment of relief when they won.
“The most priceless thing of the whole weekend was this vision of me sitting there, looking at the girls,” Belsito said. “Jenn was in the middle, Stacey was on the left, Kortney on the right. Jenn’s arms go around the girls, their heads come in and they’re like (sighing). I wanted a camera so bad. It gives me goosebumps now talking about it. It’s the coolest thing I ever saw.”
Ironically enough, the Kansas State team the women’s team beat was the team that defeated the men’s team, albeit it took four tiebreakers to claim the win, Hirschi said.
Chandler, who was part of the championship teams the previous two years, said USU’s winning ways are well known throughout the region, which made USU a prime target to knock off.
“We had teams gunning for us,” he said. “There were other teams that their coaches basically told them, ‘If you don’t do anything else, you have to at least take care of Utah State,’ which didn’t happen.”
Warnick said USU, and the other schools in Utah, do well in the regional competition, soliciting questions from other schools as to “what’s going on in Utah?”
Chandler answered, saying, “I think part of it is just the history, and once you start winning a couple times there’s a lot more competition in the state of Utah to win, so we just try harder.”
While USU has had success in this competition, it hasn’t been without considerable effort, Warnick said, as the participants have been practicing and preparing since late August. He said the students would meet together twice a week and practice answering questions and studying for topics, something that paid off in the actual competition.
“We try to do it as much like the games as we can, but at first you have to start with some of the basic stuff and build as you go. But we also did some conceptual things,” Warnick said. “One of those, the job characteristics model, they had one of the boards that was strictly the job characteristics model, that, had we not studied that, we wouldn’t have been able to do as well as we did.”
Aside from practicing, Peterson said working as a human resource manager in her employment helped her prepare as well.
“These students will know the subject matter better than, I would say, 90 percent of professionals,” Warnick said.
By winning the event, each member of the team received a $500 scholarship, as well as an all-expenses-paid trip to the SHRM conference in June, where they will be recognized on stage, Warnick said.
-seth.h@aggiemail.usu.edu