Pandemic takes a toll on bee, but top US spellers back at it
Dev Shah’s dream of returning to the Scripps National Spelling Bee ended in a soccer stadium.
On a cool, windy February day, Dev spent five miserable hours spelling outdoors at Exploria Stadium, the home of Major League Soccer’s Orlando City club in Florida, ultimately finishing fourth in a regional bee he was forced to compete in for the first time.
“My regional was hard enough to win when it wasn’t encompassing Orlando,” said Dev, 13, a seventh grader. “The fact that it’s basically representing a third of Florida, that was stressful and I started studying extra, but it didn’t work out in the end, unfortunately.”
While the National Spelling Bee is back — fully in person at its usual venue outside Washington for the first time since 2019 — Dev’s experiences illustrate how the pandemic continues to affect kids who’ve spent years preparing to compete for spelling’s top prize.
Schools and sponsors have dropped out of the bee pipeline, regions have been consolidated and the bee has fewer than half the spellers it had three years ago.
“There is a sense that COVID marks a significant break between the bee that used to be and the spelling bee that is now,” said Grace Walters, a former speller who coached the 2018 champion and three of the eight 2019 co-champs.
Another huge change: Cincinnati-based Scripps broke with longtime partner ESPN and will broadcast the competition on its own networks, ION and Bounce.
Scripps had 245 regional sponsors in 2020 for the bee that was ultimately canceled because of the
pandemic. That number is down to 198 for this year’s bee, which runs from Tuesday to Thursday.
Newspapers historically sponsored most regional bees, but as the print media business cratered, the sponsors became a hodgepodge of companies, nonprofits and government entities.
Pro sports franchises have filled the void.
The NFL’s Carolina Panthers host a massive regional bee that sends four spellers from North Carolina and two from South Carolina.
The Tennessee Titans do the same for most of their state. And Scripps ran five of its own regional bees for kids who lived in places with no sponsor.
Scripps is encouraging sponsors of larger regions to send multiple kids to the bee. The price tag for sponsoring one speller is $3,900; for two, $7,500; for three, $10,000.
The drop in sponsors isn’t the main reason the bee is smaller this year.
The 2018 and 2019 bees had a wild-card program designed as an alternative pathway to the bee for spellers in tough regions.
Karthik Nemmani, a student of Walters’ and a wild card from the talentrich Dallas area, won the
bee in the program’s first year.
But in 2019, more than half of the 562 spellers in the bee were wild cards, many of them younger kids who weren’t competitive at the national level. Scripps had planned to scale back the program in 2020.
That leaves this year’s bee with 234 spellers, all of whom qualified on merit.
There are plenty of familiar faces.
Akash Vukoti, 13, of San Angelo, Texas, who initially qualified as a first grader, is competing for the fifth time. Maya Jadhav, 14, of Fitchburg, Wisconsin, and Harini Logan, 14, of San Antonio, Texas, are each making their fourth appearances.
Spellers age out of the competition when they reach ninth grade, meaning those who qualified as sixth graders in 2019 never got to experience another “Bee Week.”
Only the top 11 spellers competed in person last year in a mostly empty arena at Walt Disney World.
“It’s a privilege, I think, for all the eighth graders in the 2022 bee to get to have that opportunity that the last two years, we didn’t have,” Harini said. “Getting to experience that as our finale, we’re very, very fortunate for that.”