Stepping up on the world stage one podium at a time

April 13, 2021

Two months doesn’t seem like a transformative amount of time, but if you consider the 60 days or so between the end of high school and the beginning of university, you can appreciate just how much a person can change within that brief window of time.

Each year, Sofy Carayannopoulos, associate professor in the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, gets a front row seat to the talents of the first-year students enrolled in her BU111 class in the Bachelor of Business Administration program.

“I absolutely fell in love with university teaching,” says Carayannopoulos who made the switch from teaching high school senior-level classes when she decided to earn her PhD instead of a master’s in education.

She enjoyed teaching high school but relished the opportunity to teach students pursuing their chosen program and preparing themselves to become career-ready.

“By virtue of getting into such a competitive program they’ve already demonstrated an investment in their own learning and recognize that being a part of this program will help them get to their endgame – whatever their goals are,” explains Carayannopoulos.

The start of something great

Once she got comfortable in her teaching role, Carayannopoulos began branching out to explore additional opportunities throughout Laurier to impact the lives of students. She was invited to become the faculty advisor for the JDCC (a central Canada commerce competition) case team in 2013. She accepted the position without really knowing what to expect apart from being required to come out to a few practice sessions and provide feedback to the students preparing themselves for the next competition.

“I started showing up to their case competition practices and was absolutely awed by what these students could do,” says Carayannopoulos. “In just three hours, this team needs to sit down and tackle a case from every angle and then come up with a presentation and slideshow that’s no more than 20 minutes and no shorter than 18 minutes – it was just outstanding what these students could do.”

In the beginning, Carayannopoulos was content to simply be impressed by the case teams’ exceptional skillset and motivation and support the students from the sidelines as a kind of cheerleader.

“It was clear we had the raw talent available to do something special,” says Carayannopoulos. “The question then became ‘how do we support these students in a way that will allow them to get to the next level of competition’?”

Catalyst for evolution

A few years after Carayannopoulos took over the faculty advisor role, she led the push to have case competitions count toward course credit on a student’s transcript.

“Preparing for case competitions is such a rigorous academic pursuit, it only made sense to recognize the hours and hours of research, analytical skills and learning our competitors invest to do this.”

With the course credit in place, Carayannopoulos took more of an active role in recruiting and coaching to identify top competitors with the required motivation and work ethic and develop their talents as individuals and team members.

“Case competition practice gives you the space and time to develop your critical thinking and presentations skills outside of the classroom,” says Kyle Collins (BBA ’20) one of the two team captains from the most recent JDCC. “Prior to my involvement in case competitions, I would stutter, talk too fast, use ‘umm’ and ‘uhh’ too often, and was generally not a great presenter. Seeing how far I, and others, have developed is something that inspired me to continue to compete,” adds Collins.

Cracking the winning formula

It didn’t take long for the pieces to begin to fall into place. The course credit and recruitment strategy was starting to pay off for Carayannopoulos who was now coaching teams in the evenings and for eight hours every Sunday for months at a time. All the practice, finessing and conditioning – equal in many ways to efforts put into varsity-level sports teams – began to pay dividends.

“By the time I started as faculty advisor we had already won five JDCCs in a row,” Carayannopoulos says proudly and notes that Lazaridis School’s teams would go on to earn more podium finishes than any business school in their division, gaining a strong reputation as the team to beat.

“Once you break down the formula for winning, it becomes clear that Laurier is perfectly positioned to do well because it has all three ingredients needed to perform at the higher level – a pool of incredibly smart and hard-working students, strong relationships with alumni who are more than happy to come back and assist with coaching, and faculty advisors who have the desire to guide the team to winning competitions across the country,” explains Carayannopoulos.

The next level

Win after win encouraged the students to set their sights higher. The international stage was the next opportunity for Laurier’s business students to prove themselves by competing against some of the top schools in the world. The trouble is, you can’t just show up at an international case competition, you have to be invited, and past performance is only one piece of the puzzle. The rest comes down to prestige and reputation and Laurier isn’t an established globally recognized brand along the lines of Harvard and Oxford.

“When we decided to try to compete internationally, my role evolved to include climbing mountains of applications and searching for any opportunity for us to break through,” says Carayannopoulos. “Not an easy task because to be invited you must demonstrate your performance at another international case competition; it was a vicious cycle – I couldn’t get in to get the results I needed to get an invitation.”

Finally, in 2016 a breakthrough presented itself. A last-minute invitation came through to replace a team that dropped out of the University of Navarra (Spain) case competition (UNICC). Carayannopoulos prepped the team as best she could and before the reality of what they were doing sunk in, they were on a plane to Pamplona.

“In Spain we did very, very well,” says Carayannopoulos. “We tied for first in our division and were able to build out a little bit of a network with people who saw this little unknown school come out of nowhere to perform extremely well against much bigger and more experienced schools.”

Momentum and intense learning continued and in 2018 the Lazaridis case teams came in first at UNICC and second at the McGill International Case Competition. Every year since then the teams have secured several podium finishes at top international competitions.

“Winning in Spain and at McGill changed everything for us,” says Carayannopoulos. Instead of me knocking on doors, begging to compete, competitions were seeking us out.”

Getting a reputation

Case competitions, especially at the international level, gain prominence through the quality of teams they can attract. Laurier’s reputation for delivering consistently world-class teams is now recognized by the selection committees and its status as ‘the underdog that wins’ earns the university a level of respect usually reserved for much larger and older institutions.

“We came in first in Belgrade in 2019. Since Belgrade was one of the 12 qualifying competitions for the Champion’s Trophy, we were invited to New Zealand to enter one of the premier competitions in the world,” adds Carayannopoulos.

A side benefit of this successful track record is the impact it has on prospective students considering their options for which university to attend. Much like draft prospects in professional sports leagues, the top students are seeking entry to the Lazaridis School because they know they’ll have a shot at some big wins and receive a boost to both their personal skillset and professional opportunities that comes with earning a place on the podium.

With success comes the need to invest in building up the Lazaridis School’s roster. Competing provincially, nationally, and internationally isn’t cheap and because the initial investments early on have paid off so well, there is hope that case teams will soon be able to say yes to vying for more podium finishes.

Just as varsity football players wanted to play for Laurier after the Golden Hawks brought home the Vanier Cup in 2005, so too do Lazaridis case teams want to build on the reputation for excellence previous students made the sacrifices to establish.

A team effort

Quick to share credit for the Lazaridis School’s remarkable performance over the last eight years, Carayannopoulos points to other faculty advisors and engaged alumni for raising the tide that’s lifting all the case teams at Laurier.

“We have our benchmark now, and it’s very high,” says Carayannopoulos. “But it wouldn’t be achievable without the help of former international team members who come back to share their knowledge with our current team members and help prepare them for what they will face. Our teams are strong because they build on the knowledge their predecessors share rather than have to create knowledge from scratch.”

Alumni such as Srin Sridharan (BBA ’14) and Sean Cameron (BBA ’15) continue to make their mark as leaders on the pathway Carayannopoulos has forged.

Cameron, for instance, now leads the Family Enterprise Case Competition team who are hot off two back-to-back first-place finishes at the Grossman School of Business at the University of Vermont. Sridharan similarly has led multiple teams that have brought home podium finishes.

“We’re often seen as the team to beat, and a big part of that is down to the time Coach Sofy spends to develop our teams,” says Cameron.

The bench of esteemed and practiced alumni coaches is certainly deep and includes Eoin Ferguson (BBA '16). Ferguson spends his days as an investment banking analyst at Deloitte, and despite his busy career, has always made time to maintain his connection to the JDCC teams. The coaching and mentoring he does at Laurier has made a real impact on the students and their performance has been excellent, placing in the top three in every JDCC competition Ferguson has coached.

Reflecting on how far she’s come, Carayannopoulos is just as surprised as anyone. “It’s been very encouraging to see what’s happened over such a short period of time,” she says. “From our first international competition in 2016 where no one knew who we were, to now overhearing other faculty advisors talking to each other and saying things like, ‘Laurier always brings strong teams, we don’t want to have to compete in their division.’”

And if the results speak for themselves, that’s a reputation Carayannopoulos is happy to have helped earn for her students and the university she loves.