Like most competitive spellers, Ashrita Gandhari has a healthy fear of the schwa. The term is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “an unstressed mid-central vowel.” To dumb it down: It’s the “uh” sound. Since English is a big ole floppy-eared mutt, stuffed as it is with fragments stolen from languages all over the world and loaded with quirks and exceptions, the “uh” sound can be generated by any of the five vowels, as well as the letter y. So if you’re competing in a spelling bee and you recognize a schwa in the word you’ve been asked, there’s nothing unstressed about it. You’ve got two minutes to dig for clues and solve the puzzle. And the world is watching.
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This is the pressurized cauldron in which Ashrita will find herself Thursday, when she will compete as one of 11 finalists in the 94th Scripps National Spelling Bee, which will be broadcast live by ESPN2 starting at 8 p.m ET. Ashrita has been competing in spelling bees since she was in kindergarten, but she is an eighth-grader now and thus in her final year of eligibility. In an effort to make the most of her last go-round, she and her family enlisted the help of one of the country’s most prominent spelling coaches, Scott Remer, who tutors Ashrita twice a week over Zoom from his home in Cleveland.
During an hourlong session last Thursday, Remer fed Ashrita dozens of complicated words while proferring tips about roots, definitions and tactics to decipher that evil trickster, the schwa. When she misspelled the word manicoba, thinking the schwa was a u instead of an i, Remer pointed out that “it’s rare for the schwa to be a u in Portuguese, right? That’s not a thing that happens so much.” A few minutes later, Ashrita defeated the schwa by correctly spelling the word bhikshu, which is pronounced “BIK-shuh.”
In an ecosystem replete with highly motivated high achievers, Scott and Ashrita make for a powerhouse pairing. She is a 14-year-old prodigy from Leesburg, Va., who is competing in her fourth Scripps National Spelling Bee, and the first time as a finalist. One former speller turned blogger pegs her as one of two “prohibitive favorites” remaining in the contest. Remer, 27, is a two-time former finalist (he finished fourth in 2008) who wrote one of the most popular textbooks on the subject, “Words of Wisdom: Keys to Success in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.” Ashrita is acutely aware that one way or another, her competitive spelling career is coming to an end, so she’s preparing with a heightened sense of urgency. “I’m really enjoying studying,” she says. “I need to give my all this year. There’s no margin for error, no second chances.”
Enjoying and studying are not words that teenagers tend to conjoin, but there is nothing ordinary about the kids who will take the stage at ESPN’s Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney Resort in Orlando, Fla., on Thursday night. Besides being an elite speller, Ashrita also finished ninth in a prestigious national science competition two years ago. She plays tennis and piano, competes on a dance team, and plans to take up guitar later this summer. “She’s very polite, she’s very hard-working, and she always comes to our lessons with a smile,” Remer says. “You can feel that she enjoys the process a lot, which is really important, and she’s able to pick up new concepts pretty quickly.”
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For those who have the misfortune of going up against Ashrita, she is, as they say in the sports world, a problem. That’s true not only for the other 10 finalists but also the grown-ups at Scripps whose job is to come up with words she can’t spell. That task has never been harder, which is why this is shaping up to be the most anticipated finals in the history of America’s most prominent spelling bee. The event was first held in 1925 (Scripps became the title sponsor in 1941), and during its first 87 years there were only three occasions when it ended in a two-way tie. Beginning in 1963, there were single champions for 50 straight years. Yet, the spellers have gotten so good, so fast that Scripps was forced to declare co-champs three straight times from 2014-16. There were single winners the next two years, but in 2019, the Bee ended in an unprecedented eight-way tie. The grown-ups just could not get the kids out. “We’re throwing the dictionary at you,” Jacques Bailly, the Bee’s pronouncer, told the contestants as the night dragged on. “And so far, you are showing this dictionary who is boss.”
At the conclusion of the 17th round, Bailly informed the spellers and the television audience that they would only go around three more times. Whoever remained would be declared a co-champion. As word spread across social media that something extraordinary was taking place, the television audience swelled. During the first 2.5 hours of the broadcast, the show averaged a little over 490,000 viewers per 30 minutes. That number mushroomed to 763,000 from 11:30 to midnight, and to 1.1 million over the final 10 minutes. At the end of round 20, the Bee reached its dramatic conclusion. The group of winners was immediately dubbed the “Octochamps,” and within minutes the picture of them hoisting the trophy en masse as confetti fell from the ceiling appeared in news outlets across the country.
It was a delightful debacle, but it came as no surprise to people immersed in this world. “The spellers and the Bee are in this evolutionary arms race, where as the spellers get better the Bee has to get harder,” says Grace Walters, 19, who coached three of the Octochamps as well as the 2018 champion, Karthik Nemmani. “You could see from the frequency of co-champs the last few years that Scripps had this coming. They’ve been dogged about staying ahead of the curve, but with the massive influx of resources, Scripps couldn’t keep up. So the spellers won.”
The Octochamps was a fun story, but only if it happens once. If it keeps happening then the Bee will turn from festival to farce. The grown-ups at Scripps know this, which is why they have made considerable changes to this year’s format. The first is a multiple-choice vocabulary round – they prefer to call it a “word meaning” round – that is being added to all the late stages, that previously was only utilized in the preliminary written test. The bigger, more controversial adjustment was the decision to utilize a spell-off in which contestants will be given 90 seconds to spit out as many correct words as they can. Whoever gets the most right wins the trophy and the $50,000 grand prize. Since the spellers will all be working from the same list, the ones who aren’t at the mic will be sequestered until it’s their turn. This is being presented as a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario, but Scripps has said that the spell-off will commence at the 1 hour, 50 minutes point if a champion has not been established. Given that the 2019 final lasted over three hours, there’s a good chance that glass will get broken Thursday night.
Many spellers, their coaches and their families are deriding the spell-off as a tawdry gimmick, but there’s no turning back now. One way or another, the 2021 Bee will produce a Unichamp. “We feel that we can achieve a different outcome than what we had in 2019,” says Corrie Loeffler, who finished in sixth place in 1995 and is now the director of programs and national partnerships for Scripps. “If we didn’t evolve the competition to match what the kids are doing then that would get kind of boring. We’ve done a lot of analysis on what happened, and we’re raising the stakes for these kids.”
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The buildup for this year’s final has been especially pitched because the 2020 Bee was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thursday’s climax, then, is two years in the making, and it will unfold in real time before what could be the largest audience ever to watch this spellbinding event. “There’s more anticipation than for any other Bee I’ve been a part of,” says Loeffler’s brother, Paul, a former Scripps finalist and current broadcaster who will call his 15th Bee for ESPN. “There are just so many unknowns. Two years ago, the Octochamps were able to slay the dragon. Now everyone wants to know: Will the phoenix rise from the ashes?”
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
To get a sense of how that question will be answered, it helps to dispel a few myths about high-level spelling bees and the people who participate in them. To wit:
Myth No. 1: A spelling bee is a memory competition. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, the official text for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, contains around 500,000 words, a quarter of which could be deemed difficult enough for high-level competition. Even for teenage geniuses, it is impossible to memorize that many words. Thus, when contestants are presented with words they don’t know, they must ask a series of questions that reveal the origins of all those fragments so they can make educated guesses. Every word is a puzzle.
“A good speller is like a word detective,” Remer explains. “A detective doesn’t arrest the first person he sees, and a good speller isn’t going to blurt out the first thing that pops into their heads. Every language has their own rules, so you have to gather clues that are going to allow you to home in on the correct spelling.”
It is riveting to watch these kids try to solve their intricate puzzles in a two-minute window under extreme pressure. Ashrita experienced a terrifying moment during the final round of the semifinals, when she was asked to spell asterixis, which she did not know. Like a quarterback reading a defense from the pocket, Ashrita went through her progressions and asked the panel for clues. Is this Greek? Does this come from the Latin root “aster” meaning inferior? Does this come from the Greek prefix “a” meaning not? May I have the part of speech one more time? She had a pretty good idea how to spell it but was unsure whether to end with -yxis or -ixis. She took a deep breath and guessed correctly. “A big part of guessing a word is speller’s intuition,” she says. “If the spelling does not look right to you, do not go with it.”
This is a big reason why so many spellers and coaches disapprove of the spell-off. Even though contestants will be able to see the definitions and roots on a screen, the spell-off devalues the detective work that is intrinsic to the exercise. It also allows contestants to misspell some words, which is not typically the case. “I think it kind of tarnishes the spirit of the competition,” Walters says. “It puts quantity over quality. The whole appeal of a spelling bee is that it requires perfection.”
Myth No 2: The parents force them. Tiger moms, hockey dads, helicopter parents – there is no shortage of unflattering archetypes when it comes to youth competitions. In the spelling world, however, those are few and far between. That is especially true of the spellers who reach the national stage, which requires long hours of daily studying all year long. Ashrita’s parents actually tried to talk her out of competitive spelling when she was in sixth grade because they feared it was too time-consuming. She insisted on continuing. “To go this far requires a high level of dedication and focus,” says her mother, Sirisha. “A kid cannot study for 10 hours a day when the parents are forcing them. If the kid isn’t motivated, they will not go this far.”
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Myth No. 3: Spellers are one-dimensional. Ashrita’s lengthy list of interests is impressive but hardly unusual. The population of youngsters who make it through school and regional stages to qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee is filled with Renaissance men and women who seem to have an unlimited supply of time to pursue other disciplines. They are artists, athletes, scientists, writers, and inveterate do-gooders. A recent top competitor was the No. 1-ranked tennis player in his age group in the state of North Carolina. One of this year’s competitors is a certified COVID-19 contact tracer at Johns Hopkins University, a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo, and a two-time state finalist in robotics. She can also solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute.
If all of this doesn’t make you feel inadequate enough, try Googling finalist Zaila Avant-garde, a 14-year-old girl from New Orleans who is another of this year’s finalists. Besides being an elite speller, Avant-garde owns three Guinness World Record citations for bounce juggling basketballs. She once appeared in a video with Stephen Curry promoting his new line of Under Armour sneakers, and she wants to be an archaeologist when she grows up.
It was Ashrita’s love of art that caused her to stumble into spelling in the first place. She was in first grade and attending an art competition when she learned there was a spelling bee taking place down the hall. She was technically too young to enter, but the judges gave her a chance anyway. She placed third and has been competing ever since, but she has never felt compelled to focus solely on spelling. “I like to think of myself as a pretty well-rounded person,” Ashrita says. “I’m not just a spelling bee girl. I’m Ashrita, and I do spelling bees.”
Myth No 4: The culture is cutthroat. Alex Cameron, an English professor who served as the Scripps Bee’s lead pronouncer for 23 years, had a mantra he delivered to the contestants at the start of the week. “You’re not competing against each other,” he’d say in his gentle baritone. “You’re competing against the dictionary.”
Those weren’t just words. Sure, the kids and their families want to win, but the culture is far more communal than cutthroat. Because of the pandemic, the early rounds were held virtually this year, but in normal times all 209 of the spellers who qualified for the Scripps Bee would spend a full week together in suburban Washington, D.C., with their expenses covered by local sponsors. Bee Week, as it is called, typically features dances, barbecues, sightseeing trips, and plenty of free time for bonding. The spellers are given a photo book called Bee Keeper, which they turn into a game by seeing how many autographs they can collect. By the time they hit the stage, they are all truly rooting for each other and against the dictionary.
This is a big reason the Octochamps debacle was so endearing. Each time one of the champions was crowned, the other seven celebrated with unabashed pleasure. The burst of mass elation at the end provided yet another window into how it all came to pass. Take hundreds of young, brilliant, well-rounded, tech-savvy, self-motivated word detectives who have spent years perfecting their craft, working with coaches and sharing information with each other, and then bring them to the microphone where they can stare down the schwa knowing the very people they’re trying to beat are genuinely hoping they get the word right?
That poor dictionary never had a chance.
It was eight years before the creation of YouTube and nine years before Twitter, but in 1997 the Scripps National Spelling Bee experienced its first viral moment. It happened when 13-year-old Rebecca Sealfon was crowned champion by correctly spelling the word euonym. Sealfon shouted out each letter loudly and slowly, thrusting her arms into the air with each utterance. Then she exploded with joy upon being declared the winner. The only thing that could match Rebecca’s elation was the humility she evinced while being interviewed afterward by an ESPN2 reporter. “I was incredibly lucky,” she said. “I could have gotten out any round.”
That video generated lots of chatter when it appeared on TV stations from coast to coast the next morning. It also validated ESPN’s decision to start airing the Bee three years before. In 2006, ESPN moved the telecast to prime time on ABC and assigned Robin Roberts to serve as host. The Bee stayed on ABC for six years before moving back to ESPN’s family of networks. As the Bee’s popularity grew, it generated a trove of books, movies, documentaries, and even a hit Broadway musical called “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” All of this captured the imagination of millions of kids who got interested in words at an early age, saw the Scripps National Spelling Bee on TV, and dreamed of holding the trophy while the confetti fell.
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The role of television and pop culture set in motion a lot of the forces that led to the Octochamps. One of those was the intense interest of Indian Americans. It started in 1985, when an eighth-grader from suburban Chicago named Balu Natarajan became the first speller of Indian descent to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Natarajan’s victory was covered widely in the American press, and it led to dozens of invitations from local Indian organizations to speak at their functions. “Indians throughout the U.S. and even in India really took pride in that victory,” says Natarajan, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. in 1970. “My family stressed that this is a big responsibility.”
Five years after Natarajan’s win, the U.S. passed the Immigration Act of 1990, which provided thousands of temporary work permits called H-1B visas for immigrants who were highly trained in the STEM fields. That attracted thousands of emigres from India, where education in those disciplines is assigned premium value. India is also one of the great linguistic melting pots on Earth. The country’s national language is Hindi, but many of its 36 states and territories have their own languages, and several have an additional subset of dialects. It is not uncommon for Indian children to grow up in a home where three or four languages are spoken. They are taught English in school at a young age, and many go on to study other languages like French and German in high school and college. When those Indians arrived in America, they brought their love of language, as well as a heavy emphasis on education and appreciation for opportunities that were not available back home. Then they passed those values on to their children who were born here.
Natarajan’s victory was the spark that set this word-loving community ablaze. It helped inspire the creation in 1989 of the North South Foundation, which over the last 30 years has hosted competitions in all sorts of disciplines while awarding more than 20,000 scholarships to needy children back home. (Natarajan, who is now the Chief Medical Officer at a hospice outside Chicago, became the NSF’s president last year.) The annual NSF Spelling Bee is modeled after the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and along with the South Asian Spelling Bee, which launched in 2008, it has created a minor-league circuit of sorts.
This community has accounted for 26 of the last 31 winners, including all but one of the Octochamps. (When the group made an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the host turned to the lone non-Indian winner and cracked, “What kind of name is Erin?”) Last year, Netflix released a documentary called “Spelling the Dream,” which explored the dominance of Indian Americans at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. One of the four spellers chronicled in the documentary was a precocious young girl named Ashrita Gandhari. Seven of this year’s 11 finalists are also of Indian descent. “They’ve really dialed in how to train and do well, and I have nothing but admiration for that,” Bailly says. “I wish we could spread that sauce.”
Two other trends completed the Octo-wave. The first was the advancement of technology. Work that used to be done with flashcards and handwritten word lists can now be loaded into Excel spreadsheets, organized into various groups, and shared with the click of a mouse. Even Merriam-Webster has become a co-conspirator by publishing an online edition, with a search engine that allows spellers to embark on what is known as “dictionary diving.” That’s where they look up definitions, which lead them to new words they can look up, and continue diving to their heart’s content. Computer technology also allows spellers to connect with each other through group text messages and social network platforms like Google hangout, through which they can quiz each other, share advice, and keep each other company.
The technological advances, in turn, spurred the growth of the coaching industry, which has been turbocharged in just the last few years by teenagers who recently graduated from the competition. The forerunner in this space is a Texas-based company called Hexco Academic, which has been publishing study materials for spelling bees since the early 1980s. When Remer was competing, he used resources from Hexco and a few other places, but his main teacher was his mother, an ER doctor. When Remer’s spelling career ended, he wanted to share what he had learned, so he put everything into a book. He was 16 years old when “Words of Wisdom” was published in 2010. The book is now in its fifth edition and has ballooned from 270 to 446 pages.
From there, Remer started coaching spellers to make a few bucks on the side. When one of his students won the Scripps Bee in 2010, it spread the notion that in order to perform at that level, a speller needed to be properly tutored. In the years since, this space has become increasingly crowded. Hexco now offers a personal spelling coach program, some of whom are former Scripps finalists who aren’t old enough to drive. There are dozens of other coaches in high school and college who make upwards of $200 an hour. Then there’s Shobha and Shourav Dasari, a brother-sister tandem from Texas who took the spreadsheets they used to advance late into the Scripps Bee and created an Internet portal called SpellPundit. The site currently has around 5,000 paid subscribers, with a premium package priced at $600 annually that gives the speller access to 120,000 words, along with thousands of roots, stems, definitions and audio pronunciations. The Dasaris are so confident in their product that they offer customers a full refund if Scripps uses a word that is not in SpellPundit’s database. “I don’t think Scripps really likes us,” Shourav quips.
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As that job got harder over the last decade, the grown-ups who run the Bee frequently discussed the idea of ending the competition with a spell-off. It was never activated partly because of the technical challenges. What happens, for example, if the speller speaks too quickly for the judges to hear all the letters? Do they have to resort to a video replay? After 2019, however, Scripps summoned an extensive internal review and decided the step had become necessary. The final approval fell to J. Michael Durnil, who was hired in March to serve as executive director of the Bee, but the process that led to it was two years in the making. “We don’t see the spell-off as taking away the opportunity to be a word detective. It’s just on a different time scale,” Corrie Loeffler says. “Every year when the champions are interviewed, they’re asked, ‘Were there any words you didn’t know?’ Usually they say no. So these kids are super prepared for the words they’re getting. We had to do something to meet the challenge they’re bringing.”
For Jacques Bailly, working as the Bee’s pronouncer is a labor of love. His day job is at the University of Vermont, where he is an assistant professor who teaches Latin and Greek. Bailly has long marveled at the enthusiasm and industriousness of the young people who step to that microphone, and he sees no reason why people should be so hyperfocused on achieving a cleaner outcome. “When people say we need to figure out who the champion is, I think they kind of need to grow up,” Bailly says. “Getting to a champion provides the media with something to talk about, but it’s not the main event for me. The main event is getting these kids to study.”
That’s a quaint notion, but the fact is that this is a major event on a big-time sports channel, and the public wants to see a winner. The more salient question is why the Scripps folks had to resort to such drastic changes when a better solution is obvious: Choose harder words. This may not be as difficult as they are making it look. There were several high-level online national bees conducted during the pandemic, and every one of them produced a single winner within a reasonable time frame. The NSF and South Asian bees also regularly achieve that result, as do dozens of local and statewide bees conducted every year. “They weren’t asking hard enough words. It kind of is that simple,” Remer says. “As someone who has a 450-page book with over 50,000 words, I can tell you the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough hard words. I’m pretty confident I could design a Bee which could get anyone out.”
If the early results of this year’s Bee are any indication, it appears the Scripps team has upped its game considerably. Between the elevated difficulty of the words and the enhanced importance of the vocabulary questions, an unusually large number of spellers were eliminated in the early rounds. Normally Scripps includes around 50 spellers in its semifinal, but when that round hit the airwaves on ESPN2 on June 27, only 30 contestants remained. One of those was Ashrita, who survived many bouts with the schwa and the scary guess on asterixis to reach the finals for the first time in four tries. Paul Loeffler remarked on air that she exuded more poise and confidence than any other speller that night, but Ashrita concedes that was all performance. “Honestly, it’s very very very nerve-wracking,” she says. “I could feel my heart pounding, but after years of practicing and competition, you learn to put up a front and make yourself appear poised and confident when you’re really not.”
Ashrita has given some thought to the post-spelling life that she will wake up to on Friday morning. She will enter high school in the fall at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., one of the top-ranked STEM schools in the country, and hopes to work as a surgeon someday. She also intends to become a coach, though she hasn’t decided yet whether to join up with an organization or go out on her own. “I still want to keep spelling in my life somehow,” she says. First, however, Ashrita has some serious business to attend to. She knows full well that when she takes the stage in Orlando on Thursday night, the schwa will be waiting, the world will be watching and her heart will be pounding. The rules may be a little different, but her goal remains true. When the moment arrives for the confetti to fall, she wants to have the last word.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic)
