National Spelling Bee Can Change Winners' Lives

By Anne Godlasky, USA TODAY

Lights will flood the stage. Cameras will capture nerves and triumphs. The nation will tune in.

Under the glare of this national spotlight, 288 competitors ages 8 to 15 take to the stage this week for the Scripps National Spelling Bee for a chance at academic glory, not to mention a possible appearance on The Tonight Show, Good Morning America, maybe even a movie. Yet for many, the hype is less a motivator and more like white noise to tune out, past competitors say

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"You could be in a sound booth in a studio or you could be on the 50-yard line of the Super Bowl," says Victor Hastings, who placed 15th in 1973 and 50th in '74. (He went out on "celerity" and "reliquary," respectively.) "Most spellers that have come that far are pretty good at shutting out distractions."

Hastings, 48, uses the skill even now as an attorney in New Orleans.

"When I'm in court making an argument, it feels like it used to be up on stage," he says. "The ability to think under pressure is something that either I had already that made me a good speller or that being in the spelling bee sharpened."

That ability is being tested in the 288 spellers — the most ever — in this year's national preliminaries happening now in Washington, D.C.

"It's bigger, and because it's bigger it's more challenging," says Barrie Trinkle, who became Hastings' pen pal through the contest. Trinkle won in 1973 by correctly spelling "vouchsafe."

"The level of competition has increased enormously," she says. "It's staggering, really, when you look at a word list today compared to one that would've been used in 1973."

By Friday, the English-speaking world will have a new spelling champion — and 287 others will have passed through the "comfort room," where the ousted get a chance to catch their breath and check the dictionary for the word they missed.

"There was a punching bag, good food, nice staff members," recalls Wendy Guey, 24, of Boston. "You could expect to see tears." Guey won in 1996 by spelling "vivisepulture," but she experienced the comfort room in previous years, starting in '93, when she placed fourth at age 9, the youngest to go so far in the final round.

This year, the youngest contestant ever competes for the trophy: 8-year-old second-grader Sriram Hathwar of Chemung Valley Montessori School in Corning, N.Y.

Guey has some advice for young participants: "Take the bee as an experience rather than a competition. It's so valuable in so many ways outside the tangible awards that come with winning."

Those awards include more than $37,000 for the first-place winner. And who can put a price on the possibility of a perfect SAT score?

"SAT vocab is kind of like the lower end of the words that you might encounter in the spelling bee. Those words you almost definitely know," Guey says. She scored 800 on the verbal section before heading off to Harvard to earn an economics degree.

Outside the world of words, it's common to find former contestants — winners or not — thriving in fields from business and law to medicine and engineering.

"To be a champion, I think it takes a certain tenaciousness and a will to succeed, and that will pretty much take you far in anything," Trinkle says.

She should know. She graduated from MIT and became a NASA engineer and an Amazon.com editor. She is now a freelance editor.

Even the many Scripps alums who didn't pursue careers in language value their bee experience.

" 'Spellcheck' is not infallible," says Raga Ramachandran, the 1988 champion who's now a surgical pathology fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.

"There's no substitute for good spelling and good writing. I've seen very educated people produce documents full of errors, and it just doesn't look good. I think Americans have an obligation to spell correctly and use good grammar because our language is being spread around the world."

Belief in the importance of spelling motivated sports medicine physician Balu Natarajan of Chicago to fly to Washington to serve as a judge and "be a part of upholding standards." Natarajan returns to the bee for the first time as a judge since winning 23 years ago with the word "milieu."

"In '85 I was more focused — it was my last chance," he says. He was in eighth grade then, the last year of eligibility. "The previous two years I had been involved in various social activities. That year … I holed up and studied."

This year, 164 eighth-grade competitors find themselves in the same position: deciding in their final year whether to take part in the Scripps-organized sightseeing and barbecues or to stay in the hotel, their noses in the books (or at the computer screens).

Opinions vary on whether last-minute studying helps, but for Natarajan, it paid off the moment he won.

"There was a sense of relief, a sense of excitement and giddiness around it," he says. "It's wild."