'So much more than just a trophy': Deer Park High School seniors are DECA world champions

May 11—A bustling array of businesses is bringing international fame to Deer Park High School.

Two Deer Park High School seniors late last month became world champions, earning among the highest awards at the international DECA championship in Anaheim, California, selected from 23,000 worldwide competitors for their management of their school's coffee shop.

"I'm honestly on cloud nine," said world champion Alayna Demir, manager of the coffee shop. "It still feels so surreal."

"World champions is crazy," said world champion Liam Bogle, DECA treasurer and transfer business manager. "That's something we chased and we chased hard."

DECA is a program for high schoolers to learn and apply skills in business and marketing. It looks a little different at each school, said Deer Park adviser Tiffany Bogle, also Liam's mom.

At Deer Park, DECA students take classes in which they manage and operate five different enterprises on campus: Jitter Bucks Coffee, screen printing and graphic design transfer businesses, two vending machines and a mobile merchandise kiosk they set up at school events. From purchasing their stock to manning the cash registers and promoting their products, each business is entirely student-run and self-sustaining; profits from each venture recycle back into the program and are invested in further business opportunities.

The two seniors are best friends; Liam Bogle joined DECA as a sophomore, and Demir joined as a junior, though they each worked in the student store a year prior to joining DECA.

"We were able to have our presentation, have our visual aids speak so clearly and so passionately about our business that we've had since (Liam Bogle's) freshman and my sophomore year," Demir said. "Like, it's been our baby that we've been able to grow."

Each year they competed, they inched closer to winning the title. Tired of settling, this year they committed themselves to go for "glass," as kids call the award. They practiced right up until the dizzying moment of their competition, meeting after school to write the 25-page paper about their coffee shop's business model and practicing their presentation in their hotel room in Anaheim until 1:30 the morning of the event, stress-crying over Domino's pizza.

"I'm still trying to fix my sleep schedule," Demir said.

"These kids are running full -functioning businesses every day," Tiffany Bogle said. "I mean, that is their class, there's no book work. It is all running actual business, actual currency, actual inventories, actual audits, regulations, all of that stuff. So really, it's just so cool to be able to see them compete with something that is so substantial."

Starting with the coffee shop operating in the school's cafeteria, the program has swelled over Tiffany Bogle's 10-year stint as adviser. They fill and deliver coffee orders from each of their schools' classrooms, and the broader Deer Park community regularly solicits merchandise from their custom screen-printing business.

"It's really cool for them to get to see their product out in public all the time," Tiffany Bogle said. "They're like, 'We make those shirts! We did that!' "

A favorite of Jitter Bucks patrons is their specialty Bean Bottles, a sweet iced coffee akin to a bottled Starbucks Frappuccino. Liam Bogle estimated they sell around 30 of those a day.

The latest addition to DECA's extensive asset-list is a massive machine that prints transfers to be screen-printed on T-shirts and other apparel. As their screen-printing business saw increased success, they invested in the machine, called "Big Betty," to print their transfers in-house. Managing Big Betty is Liam Bogle's job.

Though not intending to go into careers in café management or transfer printing, students learn more than the ins and outs of the enterprises they independently run. Demir, bound for Yakima Valley Community College and planning to study radiology, said DECA improved her confidence, taught her teamwork and connected her with medical professionals, including a recruiter who urged her to explore a program that would pay her to work in medicine while she's in school.

"DECA has given me so many real-world skills and set me up for so much success in the future," Demir said. "I have already built connections in the medical world just through going to these competitions and being able to connect with so many professionals in the world."

Liam Bogle will attend Washington State University in the fall to study business with a minor in physical education. He hopes to either own a construction company or teach and coach a sport — any sport; he's played them all.

"I know that there's a very small percentage of kids in just the U.S. alone, every state, that can say, 'Oh, yeah, we built something from scratch,' " Liam Bogle said. "Well, we took something that didn't work, and we made it work. And we got first in the world for it."

While they took home the glass, Demir and Liam Bogle aren't the only victors in their DECA team. Laura West placed in the overall top 10 in role-play score in marketing communications. Logan Kunkel and Eden Gilstrap placed in the top-18 for their retail enterprise presentation.

Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.