Westmont Entrepreneurs go High Tech to Train Athletes

Four Westmont students ran over the competition in the 16th annual Westmont Collegiate Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition. The student venture, Polaris Athletic Training Systems Inc., took first place with its high-tech training device for runners and other athletes.

Four student ventures were invited to compete in front of a standing-room only crowd at Westmont’s Hieronymus Lounge. The audience and five distinguished judges reviewed 15-minute slide presentations and 20 minutes of questions and critique. Other student ventures, Fit-For Life LLC and Living Room Galleries Inc. finished in second and third place respectively.

Polaris’ training device uses sequenced LED lights mounted in plastic tubing, individually programmed to set an athlete’s pace-regimen for running on an indoor or outdoor track. Polaris team members include Ryan Gregston, Jared Martin, Scott Upton and Garret van der Water. They plan to build a prototype and file for potential patents beginning next month.

Fit-For-Life has designed a truck-mounted mobile fitness center in hopes of targeting specially formulated workouts for older adults. Living Room Galleries came up with a plan to import high-quality oil paintings and sell them through a formal distribution network of art parties in homes. The team displayed two such paintings recently imported from studios in China.

The top three plans will now be entered in various national collegiate business plan competitions around the country during the spring semester. One of those competitions, the third annual Spirit of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development (SEED) Collegiate Venture Forum, will be held at Santa Barbara’s Andalucia Hotel, March 3-4.

Nine start-up business plans involving 30 students were conceived, researched, and developed during the fall-semester course “Entrepreneurship and New Venture Development.” David Newton, who founded Westmont’s entrepreneurship program in 1990, taught the course.

This year’s judges included: Eli Eisenberg, consultant, StraightLine Management, Agoura Hills; Susan Block, investment banker, Block, Bowman & Assoc., Santa Barbara; Barry Fay, president, Aquaflo, Santa Barbara; Peter Sutherland, consultant, PGSA, Santa Barbara and Rancho Santa Fe; Gregory Tutton, consultant, Walnut Creek and Basel, Switzerland.

Westmont has been listed among the “Best Colleges in America to Study Entrepreneurship” in Entrepreneur magazine each of the last three years and in the top 10 nationally among “Limited Curriculum Programs.

In 2003, Westmont student Eric Knopf won first prize for the southwest region in the 2003 Global Students Entrepreneur Awards Program. His non-profit organization, Epic Life, markets extreme sports clothing lines and manages extreme sports teams.

That same year, a Westmont student venture team took first prize in the Midwest Enterprise Creation Competition in Indiana, finishing ahead of teams from theUniversity of Arizona and Purdue University.

The entry, Solum Monitoring Systems Inc., introduced the world’s first wireless, remote Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems-based water testing instrument for use in commercial water treatment and wastewater treatment facilities.