Samantha Beck/ Winonan

On Wednesday, Jan. 28, WinCraft employees, including a few Winona State University alumni, joined with the College of Business staff in East Hall for a night of football games and networking to celebrate the Super Bowl.

WinCraft, established in 1961 in Winona, is the leading manufacturer of goods in the licensed sports industry. They showcased pre-Super Bowl memorabilia at the event.

College of Business advising coordinator Kattie Bredehoft helped plan the event for business students.

“It is open for all students, but we primarily targeted students whose majors are business, accounting and computer science,” she said.

By 5:30 p.m., East Hall was filled with students eating at the tables, challenging each other with a fiki football game and talking to WinCraft employees. There were a few large tables filled with delicious free food and prizes throughout the event.

“This event is to introduce WinCraft as a potential employer for our students and to expose the students to networking possibilities,” Bredehoft said. “There are open positions for part-time and full-time for graduates.”

There were several large tables with WinCraft employees specified in certain areas of the company such as customer services, informational technology, engineering, and graphic art.  Each table contained piles of informational packets and customized Winona State and WinCraft lanyards. The employees mapped out their career path to any student who asked.

The employees were able to show interested students their career path and why they picked WinCraft as an employer.

Mike Holmes, a sophomore business administration major came to the event for extra credit for his microeconomics class.

“The employees are very knowledgeable and helpful,” Holmes said.  “It was nice to see that they really enjoyed what they were doing.”

A finance senior, Hana Dan participated on the committee for this event.

“It turned out really well,” Dan said.  “The food was beyond good too.”

Due to the amount of traffic the event created, it seemed like this event was indeed successful on all accounts.

“This event was to give students opportunities to talk to alumni in their field and to hopefully make connections,” Bredehoft said.