Tonight, the Scripps Spelling Bee announced a new winner. Zaila Avant-Garde is the first African-American to win the title, ending a long streak of winners of South Asian descent.
This is a tremendous accomplishment. While all the kids that get to the final are very talented and hard-working, the South Asian kids had another advantage: An entire ecosystem of winning coaches and past champions that current contestants could easily tap into. For Zaila to effectively break through that advantage is a testament to her ability.
I hope she becomes a role model that encourages more kids to participate.
Trivia - Jacques Bailly, the official pronouncer who won the Bee back in the early '80s, went to the same grade school as Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court Justice. And itâs the same school my niece and nephew attended.
Either the year before or after Jacques, the winner was from my kidsâ school. (there were 3 winners from Denver in the early 80s and I donât know the exact order of the winners).
Very interesting story. After reading your post, I decided to lookup the list of winners and found them here:
And looking at that, you can see clustering that is not remotely random. There are the three from Denver in the 1980s you mentioned. But it starts much earlier than that. Louisville was the home of three winners in the first 15 years, as was Des Moines, IA. Recently of course there was the dominance of the South Asian community, but a large fraction of them were just from the Dallas area, including the 2018 champion and three of the 2019 co-champions.
I have come to appreciate just how much success in life depends upon seeing others succeed, believing it is possible for yourself, and finding talented people to guide you along the way. This is why clusters of excellence happen.
As I said earlier, everyone who wins this contest is immensely talented. But among this group, the ones that stand out are those that come out of nowhere like Zaila. She is the first winner out of Louisiana.
Separately, it is interesting is how much easier the words were in the past. The winning word in 1940 was âtherapyâ whereas a more recent one is âscherenschnitteâ.
Our assistant principal always bragged about the winner from our school, and the neighboring catholic school (Jacques). The mother of the winner from our school was the big coach of a lot of the kids winning under the Rocky Mountain News, not only from our school but from the catholic schools in the area. Some played basketball, some âplayedâ spelling bee.
The assistant principal pointed out that in the 1990s-2000s, many of the winners were home schooled and devoted many more hours to spelling than the average k-8 or middle school student could.
When my daughter was in 4-5th grade, one of the teachers did spelling bee after school one day a week and my daughter participated. She didnât even win the school event, never mind the city/county/state contests. It was an entirely different experience than those who were in school 20 years before her. Many of those went to the national bee even if they didnât win.