INTRODUCTIONThe Strategic Integrated Management Seminar (SIMS) course is mandatory for every senior student in the school of business at a mid-size private university in the northeastern United States. The course allows students to integrate their accumulated knowledge and apply this knowledge to issues from a strategic perspective. It examines a firm from the position of top level management, focusing on the role of the general manager in formulating and implementing corporate and business level strategy. Strategic issues of an entire athletic (hereon, footwear company or company) and industry are analyzed. Students are expected to draw their accumulated knowledge of the functional areas of their majors into a homogenous team effort. Each individual student works on developing his/her ability to analyze information, draw logical conclusions, and offer sound supporting evidence for their arguments in written form and classroom discussions. The course is highly interactive with students taking the lead and the professors sharing knowledge and offering supplementary support.The SIMS course uses the Business Strategy Game (BSG) simulation to enable students to experience a top management team perspective in running a and experiencing competitive conditions in the athletic industry. In the BSG, students compete in teams (each team constitutes a company, hereon team/company will be synonymous) within a global arena that encompasses four regions - Europe-Africa, North America, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America (The Business Strategy Game, 2016). They compete against teams in their individual classes and compare/contrast data with teams/companies worldwide. Each competes head-to-head against companies run by other teams in the course, hence competition plays an important role in the experience. Each sells its brand of to retailers worldwide and to individuals buying online at the company's website.Competing in the BSG requires a series of complex decisions by the students, taking into account the team's strategy for their and the competitive conditions in the industry and the strategies of their competitors. The simulation allows for numerous decisions for each round, requiring students to choose which decisions are most important to implement their strategy and which areas of the business must receive attention in order for their firm to be its most competitive. Beyond overall strategy (corporate, competitive) are several key functional areas for decision making. Decision areas in operations include capacity planning (either adding to existing plants or building new plants in new geographic locations), production quality decisions for the athletic footwear, plant operations efficiency, and labor decisions. Footwear must be shipped to distribution centers around the world and students must choose where it is best to manufacture the and where to ship taking into consideration demand, shipping costs, tariffs, and exchange rates. Marketing decisions include pricing the product in a wholesale and a retail environment, advertising and use or non-use of celebrity endorsements, rebates, and incentives to retailers. Financial decisions include funding the capital structure of the firm using debt, equity, and/or cash. Dividend payouts and stock repurchases may be used by the companies.The simulation has students take control of an athletic that has been in operation for ten years. Teams make in total eight years of decisions (years 11 - 18), approximately one per week. Each decision rollover represents one year and includes many decisions within the decision. The simulation evaluates team performance based on five investor expectation performance targets: Earnings Per Share (EPS), Return on Equity (ROE), credit rating, image rating (a combination of market share and shoe quality), and stock price. Each measure of performance is equally weighted at 20% of the total score (The Business Strategy Game, 2016). …