Benedictine College students participated in The Hatchery on Thursday, April 9 in the McAllister Board Room of Ferrell Academic Center.
The competition was an opportunity for current students to pitch a business idea to a panel of judges in hopes of winning funding from the Cray Center.
Seven groups of students competed for $2,000, $1,000 and $500 prizes.
The judges included faculty members Michael Parrott, assistant professor of finance, and Keevan Statz, assistant professor of marketing, and non-faculty members Nathan Price, founder of Shepards, and Tom Witherspoon, an attorney for Stinson LLP.
The contestants were given five minutes to present their ideas and then the judges were able to ask questions for an additional five minutes.
Each group was judged on the quality of their idea and presentation and the marketability, scalability and profitability of the business itself.
The first-place winner was Andrew Bergeson, an MBA student and assistant coach for Raven Football, who proposed an adjustable bench press bar called The Panora Bar.
In second place were Patrick Ransom and Alex Sigurnjak. They invented a smart powder dispenser, which they call PressGoCo, and are currently in the “tooling phase” in Vietnam.
Third place went to Cathryn Carron, a senior graphic design major. Her apparel company, The Hidden Word, uses Morse code in its designs to share the Catholic faith in hiden and subtle ways.
The Cray Center is the oldest Center of Distinction on campus, with the goal of educating people on the values of entrepreneurship and giving students opportunities and support to excel in their ideas.
