In the dimly lit auditorium of the Bullis School in the Potomac suburb, nervous youngsters wriggle in their seats on a sunny Saturday morning in early March. Some were engaging in small talks with their parents, while others sat silently, shifting impatiently in their seats once every so often. A couple of boys flipped through the 2020 Scripps Regional Bee for Montgomery County program guide and grinned in amusement at their printed names on the double-folded paper, as their family snapped a few last-minute photos.
Shortly after ten o’clock, whispers turned faint and the stage lights refocused on Traci Meakem Richmond, President of the Meakem Group and long-time sponsor of the Scripps Montgomery County Regional Spelling Bee, as she stepped up to the podium to welcome the contestants. Spellers, each proudly donned with a numbered placard around their necks, shuffled onto the stage and settled into three rows of seats. Meanwhile, the event officials shifted kids around to different chairs since several of the original forty-three contestants listed in the program were noticeably absent. Among those absent was Huy Changvu, a fourth grader and winner of the Seven Locks Elementary School Spelling Bee, who, despite having spent many weeks preparing, remained at home to recover from the flu.
Once all of the contestants were seated on stage, kids, in order of their speller numbers, approached the microphone to share their names, schools, and grade levels. Laughter erupted from the audience as Speller #29, who was notably smaller than his peers, inadvertently pulled the microphone out of its boom stand in an attempt to lower the equipment to his height. Eric Schweinzer, of Ronald McNair Elementary School, was the youngest competitor at the age of eight in a pool of qualifying spellers, who, by the Scripps rulebook, would need to have not passed the eighth grade by August 2019.
The competition began with each speller coming forward one-by-one to the microphone, and were given a unique word that seemingly increased in difficulty with each elimination round. Out of the available 472,000 Merriam-Webster dictionary words that could have been asked, students have their own strategies as to how to best prepare. Most will rely on a variation of lists and modern day spelling apps to increase their studying efficiency. Fifth-grader Sajni Srinivasan, representing Cold Spring Elementary, used AAAspell.com and howjsay.com to help her memorize and learn the pronunciations of unfamiliar words. For the few remaining words without a recording, she subscribed to YouTube’s Wordbox to learn their pronunciations. Similarly, Huy Changvu had relied on Word Club and Spelling Notebook to help categorize the 4000 words from Scripps’ recommended Words of the Champions, into different levels of difficulties. As for this year’s youngest speller at the Montgomery County Regional Bee, Eric did it the old-fashioned way — by “reading the word in [his] head, spelling it, and reading the word again.”
For more seasoned contestants like 13-year-old Ananya Gautam of Herbert Hoover Middle School, who was the runner-up at last year’s Regional Bee, preparation can be a yearlong process. One past national champion claimed to have studied for two hours every day over seven years, flipping through 3000 pages of the dictionary. Gone are the days when serious contestants borrowed lists of words from parents of previous Bees. With more competitive spellers, “a cottage industry of spelling bee test prep has sprung up, including pricey coaches and online programs and fiercely competitive minor-league bees,” according to the New York Times. Ananya started competing in a separate competition, the North South Foundation (NSF) Spelling Bee, to garner more experience when she was younger. Nowadays, usage of online study apps of varying costs as well as professional coaches that can charge up to $200 an hour are not uncommon among the “spelling elite.”
“I think it’s fine,” asserted Ananya as she believes that it is reasonable to do whatever one needs to “put your best foot forward.” But even with the option to hire a professional coach, she would prefer to not have one as she already can get quizzed by her family. Her older sister had competed twice at the Scripps Regionals, and has had prior experience with NSF. Ananya acknowledged that SpellPundit, a coaching program founded in 2018 by two former competitive spellers, is one of the most useful resources she had used when studying for the Bee.
SpellPundit, with its $600 annual subscription fee, offers a comprehensive list and guarantees to include all words in the competitions. The app optimizes study efficiency by allowing users to type rather than verbally spell. Many other serious contestants, including six of the octochamps from the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee, all rely on SpellPundit as one of their main study tools. Although a fair amount of memorization is required to study, experts agree that reading through the dictionary or studying a wordlist is not nearly sufficient.
According to Dr. Jacques Bailly, the 1980 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion and official pronouncer for the competition, preparation is not for the word that the speller has already seen, but for words that they have not seen. Therefore, it is impossible to win purely based on memorization. Students have to pay careful attention to the etymology, or the origin, of the word whether it is derived from Greek, Latin, or any various roots, in order to unlock a spelling strategy.
Moreover, winning the Bee takes more than mere technical know-hows. In a New York Times article, Spelling Their Way To Success, four former national spelling champions discussed the grit and persistence required to hone a time consuming skill, and underscored the “importance of hard work and grace under pressure.”
With increased media attention, particularly ESPN’s coverage of the national event starting in 1994, the nine-decade-old competition has ballooned into “the orthographic Super Bowl” with 11 million participants from all fifty states, District of Columbia, US territories, and many countries including Japan, Canada, Germany and South Korea, to name a few. Cold Spring Elementary School’s Sajni admits, “My motivation for the Spelling Bee was that I could be in Nationals, and on TV.”
With today’s hypercompetitiveness and overwhelming media focus, how exactly do the young contestants maintain “grace under pressure”? The day before the event, seventh grader and veteran speller Ananya Gautam always makes sure she sleeps well, and eats a healthy breakfast the next morning. Heading to the Bee, many contestants were bubbling with pre-competition nervous excitement.
“I do feel nervous, especially if the word sounds a little bit unfamiliar. I try to keep a cool head because if you don’t, then your chance of getting the word right goes a lot lower,” says Ananya. While waiting for her turn on stage, Sajni Srinivasan used a meditation method she calls “3×3”, where she states three things she sees around her while taking a deep breath in between each item.
“Surprisingly, stating the obvious helps your mental state,” she professed. Each speller had different strategies for keeping calm during the bee. Many of them were writing on their placards, legs or hands, a method Huy used at his school bee and would have used at Regionals had he been present. Scribbling on his left palm helps Huy visualize the letters so that he can drown out distractions while staying focused in the moment, whereas Eric, our youngest speller, employs his father’s color exhale-inhale relaxation technique of “breathe in pink, breath out blue.”
After a brief intermission with refreshments of cookies and lemonade in the corridor of the Bullis School’s Blair Family Center for the Arts, the remaining contestants were called back to the auditorium. By the sixth round, eight spellers were challenged with words like “vitreous”, “neapolitan”, “guttural”, and “scarab,” and the last will undoubtedly remain Eric’s least favorite word. Despite having misspelled “scarab”, the youngster’s performance and maturity were commendable among his older peers. The ninth round saw two remaining contestants, Speller #37 and Ananya Gautam, going head-to-head for another three rounds before Ananya was declared the champion, with her winning word “cadmium.”
Ananya will be sponsored by the Meakem Group with an all-expenses paid trip to join 400 others at the national level, originally scheduled for the week of Memorial Day at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Maryland. Due to the unprecedented eight-way tie in the 2019 national competition, the Scripps committee had made some revisions to this year’s rules. Firstly, the tie-breaker exam is expected to be reinstituted. Although it may not always be used every year, the test would help narrow down the number of co-champions, if Scripps is ever faced with a similar situation as they did in 2019 when eight formidable spellers beat out the dictionary.
Furthermore, the executive director of the Scripps National Bee is limiting the number of RSVBee wild cards, an initiative started in 2018 to provide students from higher competitive regions, such as Dallas or Houston, or areas that lack sponsors, an opportunity to apply for participation in the National Bee.
Last year, seventeen of the wild card spots were from elementary schoolers younger than nine years of age, who were overwhelmed in the earlier National rounds with simpler words like “gyro”, “tendon” and “allocation.” To remedy this issue, Scripps will now open RSVBee invites to only seventh or eighth graders, who at minimum won their school bees. More recently, it was announced on the Bee’s official website that all 140 RSVBee invitations will be suspended in 2020 due to the coronavirus delay.
After being asked what she is looking forward to the most with the next level of competition, Ananya excitedly replied, “Meeting other spellers and people who like spelling, too. There is a lot to love about the spelling bee!” For now, however, Ananya and her fellow National contestants will have to wait a little bit longer. Perhaps prescient of a future event, one of the spelling words at March 7th’s Montgomery County Regional Spelling Bee was, ominously, “quarantine.”
Less than a week later, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global COVID-19 pandemic and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan subsequently shut down all K-12 public schools. As a result, the Scripps committee postponed their May 24th start date, declaring, “The Scripps National Spelling Bee is suspending its national finals in National Harbor, Maryland….If possible, we will work with our local sponsors, spellers, convention partners and ESPN to reschedule the 93rd Scripps National Spelling Bee for later this year.”
“I am disappointed, of course, but it’s just postponed and not canceled yet….Speller safety comes first,” Ananya asserted. Since its inception in 1925, there have been only three years when the National Spelling Bee competition was canceled and that was in 1943, 1944 and 1945 due to World War II. With the delay, the Montgomery County Regional Champ does not see her preparation changing, “I just have more time now so it’s kind of just a perk that I can be more well prepared because the English language — you can never know enough about it.”
If one thing is for certain, the spellers are not just orthographers, but they are also well-rounded individuals who engage in a variety of activities while socially distancing in this trying time. Huy is keeping his fingers nimbled by playing his cello and piano, while continuing to practice for his basketball league once it starts up again. And although Eric is not biking outdoors as often as he would prefer due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and Ananya is limited with her swimming competitions, they both enjoy reading, “which is kind of connected to spelling. You can pick up really good words along the way.” In her spare time, Sajni loves to dance, sing and draw. Maybe she will even spruce up on her GeoBee facts and meet up with Huy next year at the State Geography Bee, as both were part of the finalist groups for their schools.
In the meanwhile, as the spellers reflect on this year’s very unique circumstances, it is important to recall a piece of advice shared by Wendy Lai, the 1990 Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion, of her experience with the competition. “It’s about the journey, not the destination….That’s so much richer than the championship itself.” However, eight-year-old Eric Schweinzer has a different set of advice in mind for organizers of the Montgomery County Regional Bee, as he pondered over the pairing of lemonade and cookies at the Bullis School during his Regional competition intermission — “What were they thinking?” Surely, milk would have gone a lot better than lemonade with such sweet treats! He also suggests that they offer a selection of fruits. There is no doubt that young Eric will be back to Regionals in the future, and it would not be surprising to find him on the lookout for a more suitable snack pairing.
Written by Huan Changvu of Cabin John Middle School
Image courtesy of creative commons