I was watching the Spelling Bee this year and, like so many of you around the country, found myself getting sucked in to the action. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t heard of most of the words, let alone know how to spell them. I was transfixed. I attached myself to certain spellers (I see you, Tejas) and was heartbroken when an 11-year-old I’ve never met nor will ever hear from again failed to spell some long word of Greek origin correctly.
I was all in. And then a newish twist in the Bee’s rules was revealed to me, and it all came tumbling down.
Here’s the newish rule (it happened last year too, but that doesn’t make it right): the Spelling Bee decided that midway through the competition on Thursday they would just kick out half the remaining spellers. Boom, gone. No words spelled wrong. They just kicked them out.
USA TODAY Staff Photo
At first I didn’t understand what was happening. I was half paying attention, and then all of a sudden they started naming names and handing out medals. What was happening? There were still so many spellers left?
Then it dawned on me — they were booting kids. Kids who hadn’t spelled a word wrong. To speed things up, they weeded out the field by removing kids who hadn’t done that well on a vocabulary test administered BEFORE the Bee even began.
This is hogwash. This is an outrage of the highest order. And I am calling shenanigans on the entire thing.
USA TODAY Staff Photo
I’m not even going to use spelling puns in this story, even though EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING IS COMMANDING ME TO, because this is serious.
You want to cut spellers out of the competition? Make the words tougher. Don’t fall back on some pre-match VOCAB test to kick kids out. This would be like if they ended the legendary Isner-Mahut tennis match early, saying Isner won because he juggled three tennis balls longer a few hours before the match. Or something. THERE ISN’T EVEN AN APPLICABLE ANALOGY, THAT’S HOW PREPOSTEROUS THIS IS.
Luckily, most of the big time spellers stuck around, including my main man Tejas (You got this Tejas). However, one of the favorites to win the whole thing, Vanya Shivashankar (sister to 2009 champion Kavya), was eliminated. Because she didn’t do well on the vocabulary quiz before the Bee.
Twitter (or the two people I follow on Twitter who were watching the Bee) erupted:
This is proof enough. One of the tournament’s best, a heavy favorite, cut down by a pre-match technicality.
Will Scripps do the right thing and fix this? I don’t know. For now, the sporting world must swallow this bitter pill, and hope, just hope, that one day things may be better.
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