DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) is a business club here at Lincoln, where students participate in multiple varieties of competitive events. DECA has been a club for multiple years, meets every Friday, and is one of the most popular clubs in Lincoln High School.
DECA’s events consist of multiple competitions starting off with the annual Area Conference. For Lincoln, this is a competition against the schools across Seattle that participate in DECA. The events consist of career-focused scenarios in marketing, finance, hospitality, and management.
This year Lincoln excelled at the conference on January 8th, having 84 students qualify to go to SCDC (State Career Development Conference). 75% of the students that competed were able to place top 13th in their events, which granted them an opportunity to compete at the next level.
At Lincoln there were 8 first place finishers 3 for singular events including William Teng (‘28), Phillip Zhou (‘26), and Micah Erickson (‘27). For team events we had 5 first place finishers including Keoki Takeno (‘26) & Ian Wu (‘26), Tesla Shic (‘26) + Angie Urban (‘26), Minal Gowda (‘26) + Siena Hohmann (‘26), Wesley Anderson (‘26) + Luke Dagg (‘26). Now let us take a deeper dive into one of these teams’ preparations that allowed them to excel at DECA.
Luke Dagg (’26), part of the first-place team in Travel & Tourism Marketing Team Decision Making event, shared what the preparation process is like.
He said his ability to collaborate with his partner Wesley Anderson (‘26) is really where the start of their outstanding performance comes from. Since attending state last year, they’ve learned and come back stronger, earning a 92/100 performance score in their event
The key to their success, Luke says, is “We really had to stay focused on our performance indicators and build around those indicators to help us stay on track, as well as knowing which one of us will address which indicators helps us create flow when we are speaking.” It’s incredible to see how these two collaborate to get the results they wanted.
When interviewing Lukes’s teammate Wesley Anderson, he gave us the thought process before they entered the event. “Me and Luke researched and used our time very wisely to have a rough idea of what our prompts could be and how we could relate them to trends we see today and figured out a step-by-step process to help us succeed.”
These two are a great example of what collaboration, preparation, and determination can do for a team.
Lincolns DECA team has excelled this year and has made incredible new milestones. There’s no telling how much better then can get next year. Congratulations to all of the people who qualified for SCDC and good luck.
