Hussain is upbeat despite missing finals
Fresno student takes the win
Third time might not have been the charm for Sameera Hussain, after not advancing to the Scripps National Spelling Bee semifinals on Wednesday, but that does not mean she is any less of a speller, and would probably still beat anybody willing to go head to head with her in a spelling battle.
The Sequoia Middle School eighth-grader fell just short of making the final round on Thursday.
“Yesterday I was a bit sad, but I’m glad I didn’t give everything in my life up for this, I’m going to make these last few days fun for me and enjoy myself,” said Hussain.
She did well by spelling both of the words given to her during Wednesday’s second and third rounds of the national even, but tested with a score of 26 in the preliminaries test. Participants had to score a 29 in order to make it to the finals.
She said this year’s test was a lot tougher than in recent years as a way to eliminate the amount of students who move on.
“The spelling wasn’t very difficult, but the vocabulary was,” said Hussain. “This year, nobody got a perfect store.”
Last year, there were 50 semifinalists. This year, the cutoff was 40 and those
students battled it out on Thursday. Hussain said she missed a few of the vocabulary out of 24 spelling and vocabulary questions.
Hussain will be returning home Saturday afternoon after staying to see the final champions battle it out, and enjoy the rest of Washington, D.C. as best as she can. She will attend the awards banquet and dance hosted every year. She also plans on visiting a couple of museums if she gets a chance, and states that although she has already seen much of the city after the third year in a row, she hopes to try a new food place and maybe go on the ferry.
As the day began Wednesday, 291 young spellers from all over the nation began spelling words most people cannot even correctly say.
Hussain, speller number 55, first correctly spelled logographic to advance to the third round Wednesday afternoon. In that round, she correctly spelled macrobiotics. In her three years of the competition, she has only misspelled one word. Two years ago, she missed out on the finals based on the preliminaries test.
Hussain, daughter of Mohammed and Rehana Hussain of Porterville, is the first Tulare County speller to qualify for the Scripps Spelling Bee three straight years.
Twelve-year-old Ananya Vinay won the 90th Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The sixth-grader from Fresno won by spelling “marocain,” a French word for dress fabric made of ribbed crepe. She gets more than $40,000 in cash and prizes.