Riverside, Calif., May, 2000--A team of university students served notice to this reality with a stunning performance at the SIFE international competition, held May 22 to 23, in Kansas City, Mo.

The competition, which featured 128 teams from four-year colleges, came down to an intense battle among the top four teams on Tuesday, May 23. The judges named La Sierra first-runner up, just behind the competition winner Southwest Texas State University. Any time a small university earns "second-in-all-the-land" status, pundits take notice. But the buzz among the crowds in the Kansas City's Convention Center was even more pronounced for La Sierra, a school that had not even fielded a team for two years.

"I heard so many people saying: 'Wow, you guys are really back, and with a vengeance,'" said Geovanny Vielmann, SIFE executive director and a senior marketing and international management major.

"There's no way to put in perspective what these young people have accomplished," said Heather Miller, La Sierra SIFE faculty fellow. "They have gone above and beyond all of our expectations - way beyond."

La Sierra SIFE teams are no strangers to success on a national level. From 1994 to 1997, the university fielded national championship teams, an unprecedented feat for a small, private college with fewer students to draw from and with limited resources. When La Sierra did not field a team for the last two years, national SIFE leaders might have thought no more would be heard from the Seventh-day Adventist college in Southern California. But armed with a new vision and a new team mantra ("A Phoenix Rising"), SIFE team members made success in Kansas City an unmovable goal.

The drama in Kansas City began this past Monday, when La Sierra's fast-paced multimedia presentation made judges stand up and take notice. In SIFE competitions, teams have 24 minutes to present the club's accomplishments to judges who are culled from the executive ranks of North America's leading Fortune 500 companies.

In a club with just over 20 active members, La Sierra SIFE racked up more than 5,000 hours in community service and business education projects during the 1999-2000 school year. Everything from "welfare to work" programs, a cow bank in India, summer day camps, and cottage industries with schoolchildren pointed to the club's near evangelical desire to educate the public on the merits of free enterprise and heroic entrepreneurial efforts.

But it wasn't until the SIFE presentation team was named in late-February, that the story started to be told - and told in the type of fast-paced, highly digestible package that makes for success on the national level. The strength of the presentation saw La Sierra SIFE breeze through its regional competition held in Long Beach on April 18, taking top honors and girding itself for bigger battles.

The presentation's strength was built on the impressive array of projects - and the tightly wound multimedia components designed by Ari Salgueiro, technical team leader and a senior graphic design major.

On Monday, the first clearance for La Sierra was being named first place in its eight-team league, besting bigger schools like Kansas State University and Siena College, and winning the "Success 2000" trophy for its league. On Tuesday, the presentation team gained confidence and roared into the second round's "Sensational Sixteen." Later that day, when La Sierra made the third round, all 800 people in a crowded auditorium knew what preliminary judges had already experienced: La Sierra was back.

At 2 p.m., the "Fantastic Four" finalists were named: La Sierra, Drury College, Springfield, Mo.; Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff; Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos.

Despite the misfortune of drawing first and having only 15 minutes to prepare for a final presentation, the team still nailed the landing, Miller said. When the final results were announced at 9 p.m., La Sierra was named first-runner up behind the Southwest Texas State University, a large state school with 21,000 students.

"We competed with the best that the country could offer, exceeded our own expectations, and pushed ourselves as far as we could and made a big statement about what a group of dedicated students can do," said Miller, a first-year coach serving a rookie team. "We're disappointed not to win, but this doesn't diminish our sense of accomplishment."

A new, recently installed trophy case now sits in the lobby of the university's School of Business and Management. Inside, four national SIFE trophies - festooned with medals and glimmering in gold leaf - point to the glorious 1990s, years of national prominence for past SIFE teams.

But a new glass trophy, slightly smaller in stature, now sits alongside these towering reminders of past glory: "Fantastic Four First Runner Up, Students in Free Enterprise 2000 International Exposition."

While the older trophies speak toward a former SIFE superpower, the new glassware speaks to a newly established contender and a team with considerable heart. The former trophies put the university on the map, but the more recent hardware makes an even more intriguing statement: La Sierra is back!

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La Sierra 1999-2000 SIFE team members are Ivan Glaze, Luke Robinson, Felipe Vielmann, Geovanny Vielmann, Shannon Wilkins, and Leslie Lardizabal, alternate.

Technical team members: Jeremy Ramos, Ari Salgueiro and Natan Vigna. Presentation support crew: Leslie Camacho, Nevious Osborne, Ben Ransonet and Jovan Zamorano.

SIFE Faculty Fellow: Heather Miller.
School of Business and Management Dean: Johnny Thomas.
School of Business and Management Student Coordinator: Cheryl Bauman.