For the first time since 1945, the prestigious* Scripps National Spelling Bee won’t be held. The brainy competition had become a fixity* on the calendar for super-spellers. This year, Scripps is taking a hiatus due to 2020’s calamitous* events: namely, the SARS CoV2 pandemic.
But that’s not stopping two Texas teenagers. Reluctant* to see nationwide competitors miss out on a major spelling bee entirely, 17-year-old Shourav Dasari and his 19-year-old sister, Shobha, took on what some consider a colossal* task: They founded the SpellPundit Online National Spelling Bee.
The siblings started their company SpellPundit last year, before the virus cast the world into such tumultuous* times. Former competitive spellers themselves, the Dasaris offered challenging wordlists and spelling-skills coaching through SpellPundit.
They’ll hold the SpellPundit online event the same week that the Scripps bee was scheduled for this year, concluding on May 28. The champion will receive $2,500 as a prize. While that falls far short of Scripps’ $50,000 award, it’s still enough to be intriguing* to a competitive middle schooler.
More than 200 spellers had registered before the end of April—including the majority of still-eligible spellers from last year’s top 50 at Scripps. The Dasari siblings are pleased with the level of exposure* their effort is getting, even if their SpellPundit bee seems ignoble* in comparison to the national competition.
“Obviously, I don't think we’re going to replace Scripps. We’re not going to get on ESPN any time soon,” says Shourav.
The timing for SpellPundit’s bee is no coincidence.* The Dasaris decided to host a bee when it became apparent that Scripps would likely postpone or cancel. Scripps considered reworking its bee into an online event. But late in April, it announced it was dropping those plans. Going virtual would be too difficult logistically, Scripps said, and it would not be true to the spirit of its live, in-person competition.
Last year, the bee made history. Eight champions came together to receive the trophy jointly on the Scripps platform, suffused* with atmospheric* bluish stage lights. Shourav thinks he and his sister can improve the bee by producing one clear winner this year. All of last year’s so-called “Octo-champs” had used SpellPundit in preparation for the bee. The siblings are devising their competition’s word list themselves, emphatic* that it will be more challenging than the late-game list Scripps resorted to when trying, unsuccessfully, to bring down some of the top eight.
Shourav is sympathetic to the plight of this year’s eighth-graders’ who prepared for Scripps. Scripps caps the maximum grade for competitors at eighth. It’s now or never for those spelling hopefuls.
“Not knowing what you would have done is worse than actually participating and coming up short. I also think that [eighth graders] should probably get another year of eligibility,” Shourav says. “It’s kind of like the Olympics—even though it got rescheduled for 2021, everyone who qualified for this year’s event should be able to go.”
(Shourav Dasari, at age 14, correctly spells his word during the finals of the 90th Scripps National Spelling Bee in Oxon Hill, Maryland, in June 2017. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
* — Words marked with * are selected from the 2019-2020 Scripps National Spelling Bee word list for eighth grade.
