“Bandit.”
That’s the word that kicked off the 2016 Regional Spelling Bee on Saturday afternoon at the UTC Fine Arts Center.
It took nearly four hours and an endless list of increasingly difficult words to whittle down the group of more than 80 local elementary and middle school students who came to compete.
All were superb spellers who would put most adults to shame, but at the end of the day, only one could take first place.
Snehall Ujjina, an eighth-grade student at Boyd-Buchanan, claimed the top spot, narrowly beating out former regional winner Matthew Prus to claim the trophy, a $600 check, an enormous Webster’s dictionary and paid entrance to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May. The spelling bee is sponsored by the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
During the contest, students stood one at a time at the microphone in front of a packed auditorium to spell aloud a word given to them by the announcer. At times the kids grimaced, buried their hands in their pockets, closed their eyes entirely or wrote out words on their hand with a finger, trying to get the spelling exactly right and avoid elimination.
No help from Mom and Dad, and definitely no pulling out a smartphone to look it up on the Internet when enigmatic Italian or Russian words were thrown at them.
The words ranged in difficulty from common ones like “algebra” to significantly more obscure things like “tokamak.”
“The Russian tokamak is part of the international project for creation of the world’s first industrial thermonuclear reactor,” the announcer offered as help when the student who had to spell the word asked her to use it in a sentence. He then spelled it correctly.
When it came down to Ujjina and Prus, the pair fist-bumped on stage before entering the final round. Ujjina managed to pull away after his opponent misspelled a word and he correctly spelled “ruthlessly” and “sorrowful.”
Prus was the winner in 2014 and he said he’s been training for years to keep competing, much like many of the other top candidates. Some will spend hours every week poring over word lists and identifying commonly misspelled words to avoid the same mistakes.
But all the training in the world can’t always prepare a speller for what he’ll confront on that stage, as Ujjina said while holding his enormous trophy.
“‘Fipple’ was the hardest word I had to spell today,” Ujjina said with a laugh after winning. “I couldn’t tell if she was saying ‘fipple’ or ‘fibble.'”
Contact staff writer Emmett Gienapp at egienapp@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6731.