Students compete in spelling contest
8th-grader wins dramatic Central Florida regional bee
In the final minutes of the 58th annual Central Florida regional spelling bee Wednesday, 12-year-old Ava Allen got on her knees to pray.
“I was just praying I would do as God wanted me to do,” said Ava, a seventh-grader at Orlando’s Libertas Academy who gave up the violin and hours of free time to study spelling words.
In what became an emotional, three-hour contest, more than a dozen students competed for a trip to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., an event that’s become so popular it’s televised live on ESPN.
It took 17 rounds until Orlando resident Siyona Mishra, 13, was declared the winner by spelling “sphacelated” correctly. The word means to become gangrenous.
Ava, competing in her first Orlando Sentinel-sponsored regional spelling bee, finished third.
Some of the elementary and middle school students couldn’t hide their emotions. There was the girl who scrunched up her face in anger when she stumbled in the early rounds and the one who sobbed in her parent’s arms when she lost.
Philip Booker, a fifth-grader from Sanford who was perhaps the smallest speller on stage, strode up to the microphone. Already, the 10-year-old knows he wants to go to Full Sail University and become a video-game developer someday.
To prepare, some days he spent hours studying — reading the words, writing them so they would stay in his head or with his father quizzing him out loud.
Other days, Philip was just a kid, free to read his Harry Potter books or play video games, his favorite.
“I gave him the choice,” said his father, Phil Booker, an engineer. “This is his decision how hard he wants to work on this.”
In his head, little Phillip from Bentley Elementary saw the ultimate prize: The champion trophy that comes with
$2,400 to cover expenses to the national spelling bee in June, a $50 gift card and a Merriam-Webster dictionary — not that the spellers would need it.
“I like the feeling of competition,” he said. “I wanted to win.”
But the word that ended his spelling bee came in the fourth round: Romaji, defined as a system for writing Japanese words using the Latin alphabet.
Philip returned to the audience with sad eyes. He sat next to his father and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” his father said, rubbing his back.
Philip rested his head on his dad’s shoulder while the rest of the spellers continued without him.
Many of the words used might never slip into an elementary or middle school student’s vocabulary, like fidelity or oncology or huia, a bird that’s been extinct in New Zealand since the 20th century. Some students wrote invisible letters on their palms before saying them out loud. Others spelled with clenched fists at the microphone.
Watching the event closely were three judges from the University of Central Florida’s library system and many family members who felt as stressed as their young spellers inside the Orlando Sentinel’s downtown headquarters.
But Siyona, the bee’s winner from Orlando Science Middle School, showed little emotion as she endured the rounds. She wasn’t one to panic if the word didn’t sound familiar.
She played detective, looking for clues in the word’s origin, on how to spell it, she said.
Her passion to learn also helps her navigate words.
“It started because I love to read,” Siyona said of her spelling bee success. “I love learning languages.”
Siyona, who wants to become a cancer researcher, was one of the most experienced spellers on stage.
Last year, she finished second at the regional bee. As a baby-faced sixthgrader, she won the regional event and placed ninth at the national competition in 2015.
Before every spelling bee, she has eaten waffles and syrup for breakfast, which she figured was a good luck charm.
It worked Wednesday.