EIU Department of School of Business

Holley High School Competitions

Our 2025 Grand Champion school Mount Zion with their instructor, AnnaMarie Hanes

View past Holley Competition winners here

The 2026 competition is coming soon. We will again have three divisions: business ethics, business applications, and sales & entrepreneurship. 

• In the ethics division, student teams will collaboratively analyze, present, and then respond to questions posed by a panel of judges regarding a common business ethics case all teams will evaluate. The case will be prepared on-site, the day of the competition.
• In the business application division, student teams will collaboratively solve common problems utilizing spreadsheets, word processing, and presentation software applications
• The sales & entrepreneurship division will be a professional sales competition with students pitching an existing product to a panel of judges

Students will compete against teams from high schools and high school business organizations across Illinois. The experience promises to challenge students’ ethical reasoning, application skills, and presenting skills, as well as provide a wonderful networking opportunity. In the end, we aim to raise students’ awareness of the importance of corporate social responsibility and hone their abilities with business applications and presenting to a group. 

Prizes will be awarded to the top three case presentation teams. All competitors on a team will receive a certificate of competition and an EIU t-shirt.

Debuting last year, a grand champion school will also be awarded to the overall, best performing school who fields at least one team in each category.

Invitations were sent out on November 17, 2026.

Note on Registration: This year, we anticipate registrations will exceed our capacity for the competition.  To address this, we held a pre-registration period for past participants and now the general registration period is open.  Registration will be open until January 23^rd but we highly recommend registering as soon as possible to assure there is still space for your school.  Once we hit our limit, we will keep a wait list and let everyone know where they stand.

The registration form can be found here: https://forms.office.com/r/eKA4CYusGX

Competition Day: February 27, 2026

If you are interested in participating, please contact Dr. Robinson at nrobinson@eiu.edu for more information or to be added to the contact list.