First pitch

Jordan sits in a small, stuffy interview room, waiting. Outside, back against the closed door, is Ambition — blue suit, red tie, portfolio in hand, sales pitch running on repeat.

Months of preparation for 15 minutes. He knows what to say. He knows what to do.

He knocks.

“Hey Jordan, how are you doing? It’s good to meet you, Jordan.”

“I am not Jordan,” says Jordan, who is not Jordan and does not appreciate being called Jordan. “We had to let him go. He stole the cookie dough formula, so we sent him off to an island. This is my first day. Anything I can help you with?”

Ambition pauses but doesn’t freeze. “What is your name?”

“My name is Case,” he says — and this time, at least, that part is true.

They shake hands. The clock is already running.

“I’m just curious,” Ambition says, settling in. “I graduated from Georgia, and you graduated from Florida. As a fellow SEC graduate, I wanted to hear a little more about your favorite thing there.”

“Yeah, so Jordan graduated from Florida,” Case says. “I went to Georgia. Born and raised.”

A beat. Then a smile.

“Go Dawgs.”

“Yeah,” Case says. “Go Dawgs.”

A week earlier, in a Correll Hall classroom, nearly 50 professional and advanced sales students gathered for an evening session to prepare for Role Plays with Professionals, a rite of passage for Terry College sales students. Those who survived it previously coached those about to try.

The newcomers had questions. Or, more accurately, concerns.

“I heard one got halfway through and it was over.”

“I heard one answered every question with one word.”

“I heard one wouldn’t stop talking.”

How do you deal with that?

“Don’t be scared. They’re going to give you different answers than you’re used to,” says Eliza Reardon (BBA ’26), one of the advanced sales survivors. “They’re going to push you, and they’re not going to help you out.”

“Sometimes they will ramble on about their experiences that have nothing to do with you,” says Sacha Brickey (BBA ’26), also an advanced sales pro. “They’ll just come up with stuff, but you want to steer them back.”

“Don’t worry about the horror stories you’ve heard,” says Cindy Rippé, the architect of the exercise. “Don’t assume I’m using the same buyers.”

Pause. Then a teasing smile.

“There are new horror stories.”

Act I: The Teacher

If not for a professor who saw something in her early, Rippé’s path might have looked different.

“I knew one day I wanted to help students the way someone helped me,” she says.

It didn’t begin in sales. With a degree in advertising, she planned to work on the creative side — building campaigns, shaping messages. A job during college shifted that trajectory. Sales, she realized, offered something else: immediacy, consequence, the ability to read a situation and adjust in real-time.

She was good at it.

After graduation, Rippé sold ads for newspapers across Florida and Mississippi. Then other things. Houses. Peanut butter. Books and software for attorneys. Bakeware. Enough variety to learn that the product mattered less than the person in front of you.

She spent nearly two decades doing it. When she moved into teaching, that instinct came with her.

“I was hired as an adjunct,” she says. “And nobody teaches you how to teach.”

She defaulted to what she knew. “I treated the class like a sales call. Figure out their needs, build rapport, show them why it matters.”

It worked.

Over time, she developed a model that went beyond simulation, placing students in situations with real customers, expectations and consequences. At smaller schools, that approach scaled naturally. At Terry, it didn’t.

“My first year was rough,” she says. “What I did was so personal. Scaling that was hard.”

She adjusted.

Students who showed potential became part of the system — hired as sales ambassadors, trained to coach others, extending the reach of the classroom. New tools followed, including generative AI scenarios that allowed students to practice against an uncooperative, unscripted customer.

The environment changed. The premise didn’t.

When she found her footing, students discovered competitive success. Her beginning sales classes are assisted by professionals and students in the advanced classes; her advanced classes by professionals from companies Rippé added as sponsors. Proof of her success sits in the trophy case outside her Benson Hall office, and in the graduates who found employment with top companies.

“Everybody’s good, the students are learning, competition helps them grow and learn,” she says. “I teach sales skills, but I teach them so many other things this generation needs.”

Some of them set out to do this.

Jake Schaflander (BBA ’26) did. His father was a salesman, though he never insisted his son follow the same path.

It was less about the job than how you did it.

Schaflander spent one summer as a plumber’s apprentice in the homes of Hollywood stars — long enough to rule out a future in waste management. But what stayed with him was something else: a preference for solving problems in real time, with real consequences.

Sales, as it turns out, offers exactly that.

“I can sit by myself and be comfortable in the silence,” he says. “But if someone’s next to me, I don’t mind asking a question. I never really felt that awkwardness some people talk about. And if I can build a relationship while solving a problem — and get paid for it — that’s a dream.”

Others didn’t set out to sell.

Jackson Meier (BBA ’25) didn’t even know what sales were. “Maybe like a car salesman?” he says. An economics major and self-described analytical math guy, he enrolled in the course for a more practical reason: the syllabus mentioned “professional development,” a skill needed on his LinkedIn profile to gain internships (the kind of logic an analytical math guy might follow).

On the first day, that calculation met reality.

“Everyone had to come up and give an elevator speech about themselves,” Meier says. “I’m an introverted guy, and this is absolutely horrifying. My heart was beating out of my chest — it was pushing me out of my comfort zone.”

The instinct was immediate: drop the class, move on.

He didn’t.

“I thought,” he says, “this is probably going to help me grow as a person.”

And then there’s Katina Inglis (AB ’25), whose path to sales came with a different set of expectations.

Diagnosed with severe dyslexia at a young age, she was told her academic life would be one impossible barrier after another, that she would never measure up. “Your limitations don’t belong to the world,” she said during her speech at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication graduation in December. “They are yours to rewrite.”

A public relations major who loves talking and getting to know people, Inglis discovered sales meshed perfectly with her personality.

Rippé’s class was a commitment that kept slackers at bay, rewarding people looking for a challenge. When she started competing — and succeeding — she found her calling. Where Schaflander was drawn to problem-solving and Meier to personal growth, Inglis saw something more direct: a pathway.

“Come to class and get a job,” she says, repeating Rippé’s mantra. “I don’t know if I would have been employed had I not taken this course. Cindy’s the only teacher I know who has proven results for employment.”

There is no prerequisite for understanding sales. What they were learning — in different ways — was what it demands, and what it can return.

The Sales Dawgs are the reigning champions of the International Collegiate Sales Competition — an outcome that feels less inevitable when you consider that, two years ago, there was no Sales Dawgs.

Last November, the team of Schaflander, Meier, Inglis, Jack McRoberts, Ashlee Hall and Patrick McBride moved through a field of 80 universities and finished at the top. The setting may not resemble a stadium, but the stakes are not abstract. The competition has a way of making itself feel final.

By then, Meier had reshaped his early hesitation into something quieter — less about performance, more about control.

“Everything’s just a good conversation,” he says. “Have a great time, make a friend, and a sale comes with it.”

He arrived at the championship in a different role, mentoring Schaflander and Inglis, watching more than speaking. But as the rounds progressed and the margins narrowed, Rippé asked him to step in — to take a spot, to make a pitch.

It was an opportunity. He knew it.

“I’d won competitions before,” he says. “I thought I could do it again. It would’ve looked good for me,” he says. “But it meant taking a spot from Jake or Katina. And after talking with them, I knew how much they wanted it.”

So, he didn’t.

“It was time to step back,” he says, “and make it my goal to help them win.”

Win they did.

Schaflander and Inglis advanced to the final four in role play. McRoberts was a finalist in speed selling.

“Jake and I worked incredibly hard,” Inglis says. “Being partners to the very end — that doesn’t happen. He had confidence in me. I had confidence in him. I didn’t want to be there without him.”

The morning of the final, Schaflander received a text from his best friend.

“I thought he was congratulating me about the results,” he says. “But he said, ‘Jake, I don’t really know how to tell you this, I’ve been having headaches, and they found a tumor in my brain.’”

He broke.

Forty minutes before the final round, he found Rippé and Inglis. They were preparing. He told them he couldn’t compete.

“They knew something was wrong right away,” he says. “Cindy listened. She told me there’s nothing I can do right now — and I might not want to hear that. But you’ve made it this far. We’re proud of you. We don’t care how you do.”

He competed.

Schaflander finished second. Inglis finished fourth. The Sales Dawgs won the title.

“Cindy taught me something that will stay with me for the rest of my life,” he says.

“Honestly, it was very special,” Inglis says. “Very personal.”

For Meier, watching from the outside, the outcome carried a different weight.

“It brought me more joy seeing them win than it would have stepping on that stage myself,” he says.

Schaflander’s friend underwent surgery. He’s doing well.

Reardon is the organizer, the conductor. Laptop in hand, head on a swivel, she moves through the room as Rippé’s field general — and the Top Dawg Sales Competition is her front line.

Eighty students. Sixty-four professionals. Thirty-six rounds. Thirty-two sponsors. Seven hours. Four finalists. Two locations. One winner.

“It’s going good,” she says, as networking gives way to lunch. “A few hiccups, but we’ve handled them. It’s too much to go perfectly everywhere. But we should have a good final round.”

The day began with 16 finalists, each working through weeks of prelims to get here. By noon, 16 is down to four: Nic Wiles, Sam Kenny, Grey Foster and David Nelson. Acting as sales representatives for Hendrick Automotive Group, they’re pitching a fleet of Mini Coopers to professionals playing executives from a growing cookie dough company.

The pitches are televised for a live audience.

It makes for good television. It’s also something else.

“There’s learning in watching,” Rippé tells a room of students gathered in Stelling Study. “Think about the sales process I’ve taught you. Think about what you’re seeing. What works? Where is there room for improvement?”

It begins.

Wiles walks in, introduces himself, starts with small talk — and the buyer takes a phone call.

He waits.

“There’s just no way,” the flustered buyer says into the phone. “I don’t even know if we have the budget for this type of gas. It’s going to absolutely destroy us!”

The scene replays three more times, each finalist given the same interruption. It’s deliberate. Another one of Rippé’s adjustments.

There’s another, quieter one.

On the back page of the presentation packet is a detail easy to miss — information about a newly released EV model.

Not everyone sees it.

Wiles does. Nelson does. Their conversations shift. The pitch bends. The sale closes. Nelson takes the top prize, and Wiles finishes second.

“It’s funny,” Nelson says afterward. “I was going to drop this class after my first exam score of a 71. Dr. Rippé sat me down and said, ‘David, exams don’t tell you who you are. You know how to do this.’ She roped me back in. I couldn’t have done it without her.”

In this setting, things rarely go as planned.

Buyers take calls. Details hide in plain sight. The conversation moves whether you’re ready or not.

Sometimes, the person across the table isn’t who you thought they were.

The students who succeed are the ones who stay in it — who adjust, who listen, who keep the conversation moving even as it shifts beneath them.

It’s what they do at Terry.

They knock.