First black in 96 years to win the spelling bee

[avon barksdale]

Do your thing young queen

 

[3rdWorld]

 

[Koba St]

Damn, Napoleon’s Hindus have been finally beaten

 

[filial_piety]

congrats to her

 

[Diondon]

#blackexcellence

 

[SlimeyLilDude]

Black Excellence

 

[Jekyll]

“first black”

 

[Billy Ocean]

Little Queen is also a top notch basketball player and has 3 Guinness Book World records for dribbling.

 

[The Mad Titan]

Louisiana

 

[MischievousMonkey]

The only previous Black champion was also the only international winner: Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica in 1998. The bee, however, has still been a showcase for spellers of color over the past two decades, with kids of South Asian descent dominating the competition. Zaila’s win breaks a streak of at least one Indian-American champion every year since 2008.

Zaila has other priorities, which perhaps explains how she came to dominate this year’s bee. She is a basketball prodigy who owns three Guinness world records for dribbling multiple balls simultaneously and hopes to one day play in the WNBA or even coach in the NBA. She described spelling as a side hobby, even though she routinely practiced for seven hours a day.

“I kind of thought I would never be into spelling again, but I’m also happy that I’m going to make a clean break from it,” Zaila said. “I can go out, like my Guinness world records, just leave it right there, and walk off.”

Many of top Scripps spellers start competing as young as kindergarten. Zaila only started a few years ago, after her father, Jawara Spacetime, watched the bee on TV and realized his daughter’s affinity for doing complicated math in her head could translate well to spelling. She progressed quickly enough to make it to nationals in 2019 but bowed out in the preliminary rounds.

That’s when she started to take it more seriously and began working with a private coach, Cole Shafer-Ray, a 20-year-old Yale student and the 2015 Scripps runner-up.

“Usually to be as good as Zaila, you have to be well-connected in the spelling community. You have to have been doing it for many years,” Shafer-Ray said. “It was like a mystery, like, ‘Is this person even real?’”

Shafer-Ray quickly realized his pupil had extraordinary gifts.


“She really just had a much different approach than any speller I’ve ever seen. She basically knew the definition of every word that we did, like pretty much verbatim,” he said. “She knew, not just the word but the story behind the word, why every letter had to be that letter and couldn’t be anything else.”

Sometimes she knew more than she let on. Part of her strategy, she said, was to ask about roots that weren’t part of the word she was given, just to eliminate them from consideration.

She's impressive and very gifted

 

[avon barksdale]

 

[Arianne Martell]

This just made my day!

 

[feelosofer]

Akeelah and the Bee in full effect.

Congrats to the little sister.

Nothing against those Indian kids but it's good to see some change.

 

[Money Be Green]

She plays like a pro

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

Damn, Napoleon’s Hindus have been finally beaten

Explains why they didn't make the thread.