The juniors were on the winning team at this year's Enterprise Leadership Conference, sponsored by the Rotary Clubs of San Jose and Los Gatos. At the conference students learn how to build and market a product or service through lectures and workshops by business experts.

"It's all around how you put together a good business plan," said ELC chairman John Baird. "They learn how to make a winning presentation when selling a business proposal."

Once they arrived at Asilomar for the three-day conference on March 9, students were divided into 11 teams of eight, each with four boys and four girls. Organizers tried to put students from a variety of schools on each team. No one on this year's winning team attended the same school.

Shannon Gonzales, a junior at Lincoln High School, said she was drawn to the conference by the prospect of getting to know peers from other high schools who were also eager to learn about the business world.

"I'm interested in meeting new people, and I'm interested in going into business," added the 17-year-old. "Lincoln is a performing arts school, so you really don't get any business extras."

Shannon's teammate Ashley Chang, 16, said Leland High School's curriculum is similarly lacking.

"I want to major in business, and I thought the conference would be an excellent opportunity," Ashley said. "At school they don't teach you about business itself."

Ashley said the conference allowed her to better explore the business world.

"There were so many different speakers with so many different ideas," she said. "It was interesting to hear their points of view."

The Leland student also enjoyed the camaraderie she developed with her teammates.

"I got to meet new people, and I think they're awesome," she said. "That was the biggest prize."

One of Shannon and Ashley's teammates was an exchange student from Toulouse, France. Pierre-Hugo Wadel, who is spending his junior year at Willow Glen High School, said the conference was "one of the greatest things I've done since I've been here."

"It was also a lot of work," said the 16-year-old. "We developed the capacity to create our own business and work with other people and their ideas."

The team developed a product called the "water badder," a large underground tank for filtering and recycling non-potable water.

"We decided to market it to home developers because we knew no current homeowners would dig up their back yard to put it in," Shannon said. "There's an incentive for homebuyers to buy a house with a tank because over time, it would decrease your water bills.

"We were looking at a partnership with the San Jose Water Company," she added. "They'd offer rebates to people who had the system in their homes."

Shannon said her team initially had a hard time agreeing on a product.

"There were eight people, and everyone had different ideas," she said. "We didn't know how to organize them into one concrete idea."

By the time her team gave its presentation before the ELC judges, they'd figured out how to get organized. The team's effort was deemed the strongest, and Shannon and her peers went on to pitch the "water bladder" to members of the Los Gatos Rotary Club. But even that presentation had its hitches.

"Two team members couldn't make it, so we had to do some compromising and reorganizing," Shannon said.

Ashley said the teamwork displayed at Los Gatos Rotary was typical of how the students cooperated while developing the water bladder.

"We worked together really well, and it showed because we won," she said.

"What made our team win was that we had great communication," said Pierre-Hugo, adding that the father of his host family is an ELC board member. "I told him from the beginning that we were going to win."

Ashley said her mother offered her team some inspiration.

"My mom was talking about how she wastes a lot of water," Ashley said. "She had an idea--not for a water tank, but just to do something. She inspired us, but we came up with the idea."

Pierre-Hugo, who worked on the financial end of his team's business plan, said the conference judges were impressed by the profit/loss statement for the water bladder.

"The first year we had a loss," he said. "Some teams went with a profit in the first year, but we tried to make it really realistic."

Shannon said the conference was "so much fun" but "very, very intense."

"We had three days to work on this thing, and we had to go into a lot of detail," she said. "I didn't think it was going to be as much work as it was."

While Asilomar is located on the beach in Pacific Grove, Ashley said she and her teammates didn't spend too much time soaking up the sun, choosing instead to devote their free time to their presentation.

"A friend who went to the conference last year told me it was a lot of work," she said. "It doesn't have to be. It depends on how much time you want to put into your project."

The conference board recruits high school juniors from U.S. history classes throughout Santa Clara County to attend the conference. Baird said the competition for a spot on an ELC team can be quite stiff.

"This year we had more than 200 applicants and we chose 88, so it's pretty selective," Baird said. "They're not necessarily A students, but a lot of them are leaders. They have to have good grades, but a lot of them also have volunteer service."

It's this combination of talents that makes a student a good candidate for the conference, Baird said.

"The entrepreneurial spirit requires a different kind of smarts, not just book smarts," he said.