The Executive - Spring 2015

The Southeastern Conference is home to some of the most competitive universities in the country. Football stadiums, basketball arenas and softball fields fill each and every week as supporters pile in to watch the showdowns. Outside the athletic realm, however, competition in the academic arena continues to heat up. And there is one team that means business.

The Manderson Graduate School
of Business in the Culverhouse
College of Commerce is taking their
preparations for the competition to the
next level, constructing a year-round
team that trains and competes in case
competitions around the country. The
team was formed at the beginning of the
2014 fall semester and officially began
working toward the third annual SEC
MBA Case Competition in April 2015 at
the University of South Carolina
Four members of the newly created
Manderson MBA Case Competition
team traveled to Florida Southern
University and ran the board, winning
first place at the Business Strategy
MBA Case Competition. Students Jeff
Davis, John Garrett, Nathan Tempco and
Prakash Sudhir worked together at the
competition in Lakeland, using the skills
they have perfected while practicing and
traveling to other competitions.

Tut Wilson, director of MBA recruiting and admissions, and Dr. Brian Gray, associate dean of the Manderson Graduate School of Business, came together to find the best and brightest students to form the team and develop a serious competitive edge. Nine hand-picked students, including the four Florida Southern winners, are participating in case competitions throughout the fall and spring semesters, leading up to the SEC MBA Case Competition in which each SEC school will have a team of four.

Why nine people for four spots? “It’s like a football team. You have 80 or 90 players, but you only field 11 at any given time. It’s the same thing here. The SEC MBA Case Competition uses four per team, so in the spring we’ll select our team of four based on their performance and team chemistry,” Gray says. “When we hosted the SEC Case Competition last year, it served as a great opportunity for a lot of our students to see how that worked, and it also motivated certain students to want to compete. We can compete just as well in the classroom as we do on the field.” The new strategy of a year-long team came from realizing that in years past, team recruitment was too late. Internal competitions were typically held in January, and students were more interested in the job hunt than competing on a case team. The fear of the