The Scripps National Spelling Bee has a new champion in 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde. The Louisiana native made history as the first Scripps spelling bee champion from her state, and the second Black Scripps champion in the competition’s 96-year history.
Avant-garde breezed through eighteen rounds of obscure words before landing on murraya. With little to no trepidation she correctly spelled the word, which is a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees, and was named the champion on July 8.
The gleeful teen lit up with joy as he jumped, smiled victoriously, and twirled onstage in the storm of celebratory confetti.
“I’ve been training for two years, for training doing 13,000 words for seven hours so I kind of more expected it,” said Avant-garde when discussing her history-making win with “The Black News Channel.”
Her victory also marks the first for a homeschooled student since 2000, and the 52nd win for a female competitor. In 1998 Jamaican Jody-Anne Maxwell also won the Scripps Bee, making her the first non-American winner and first Black winner.
“I was really happy when I got the trophy,” said the accomplished eighth grader, who attributes her win to luck and hours of studying, a journey that began when her father, Jawara Spacetime, was watching a spelling bee on television years ago and realized his daughter’s talent for math could mean she’d do well in spelling competitions.
Avant-garde made the preliminary rounds of the Scripps national finals in 2019, and after that began working with a private coach, Cole Shafer-Ray, the 2015 Scripps runner-up. He describes his star pupil as unusually gifted.
“Usually to be as good as Zaila, you have to be well-connected in the spelling community,” he told The Associated Press this week. “You have to have been doing it for many years,” Shafer-Ray said. “It was like a mystery, like, ‘Is this person even real?’”
The soon-to-be high school freshman clearly has the scholastic aptitude to achieve her goal of attending Harvard University, but her success is not limited to the books. Avant-garde also holds three Guinness World Records — most balls juggled in one minute with four basketballs, most dribbles in 30 seconds with four basketballs, and most basketballs (six) dribbled by one person simultaneously.
On social media, the new spelling champ’s accomplishment has garnered countless reactions.
Watch the clip below:
