Wednesday morning began with 148 contestants at the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. By day’s end, Tampa seventh-grader Bruhat Soma was among eight that remained.
Bruhat, 12, who competed in the bee the previous two years, has a chance to the give the Tampa Bay area back-to-back champions after Largo’s Dev Shah took the crown in 2023.
He will return with the other finalists Thursday night, when the winner will receive a trophy and more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. The competition begins at 8 from the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center hotel in Oxon Hill, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.
The finals will be televised by Ion (locally WXPX-TV).
Bruhat, who attends Turner/Bartels K-8 in New Tampa, has worked his way through eight rounds, successfully spelling coulisse, confiteor and cricetine, among others.
He fared better than two others from the greater Tampa Bay area. Jordin Oremosu, 14, from Lutz Preparatory School, and Amara Chepuri, 11, who attends Lakewood Ranch Preparatory Academy, were successful through three rounds and finished 60th. Both were in their first showing at the national level.
The first winner from the Bay area was Nupar Lala, who clinched the 1999 title by spelling logorrhea. (Dr. Lala is a now a neuro-oncology fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.)
The structure of the spelling bee has undergone plenty of changes since then, but over the past three years under executive director Corrie Loeffler, the competition has gotten very hard, very fast for spellers who make it past the preliminary rounds.
Amara’s father, Ananth Chepuri, thought his daughter was eliminated by one of the most difficult words (ephectic) of what he called an inconsistent round.
“It's been brutal,” he said. “The first kid, I felt so sorry for him. This was a bloodbath!”
The bee began Tuesday with 245 spellers. After Wednesday’s first quarterfinal round, there were 59 left, and 46 of those got through a vocabulary round to reach the semifinals.
The champion won't be Shradha Rachamreddy, who finished third last year and was a consensus favorite to go all the way. She was eliminated on exactly the sort of “super short, tricky word” she said she concentrated on studying after misspelling “orle” last year. This year it was varan, a type of lizard. She added an extra “r,” and former spellers in the audience gasped at her mistake.
“I am in shock and despair,” said Dev, last year’s winner, who now attends Largo High School and has been at the finals showing support for the other contestants.
“We all thought she was going to win,” added Charlotte Walsh, last year's runner-up.
Starting in the quarterfinals, the bee's word panel can use any of the more than half a million words in Webster's Unabridged dictionary, plus some geographical names that aren't even listed in that volume. While the panel tries to maintain a consistent level of difficulty in each round, it can vary from word to word.
Rare is a speller like Vanya Shivashankar, who came in with enormous buzz in 2015 after years of strong finishes and ended up winning. Even Shivashankar had a setback the previous year when a written spelling and vocabulary test kept her out of the finals.
Naysa Modi, the 2018 runner-up, didn't make the finals the following year. Ishika Varipilli, who hoped to make a run at the trophy this year in her third and final attempt, bowed out in a tie for 47th after missing a vocabulary word, “swanky," and said afterward she was “trying to keep it together.”
In the semifinals, Shradha was followed to the exit by two more top-ten finishers from 2023: Aryan Khedkar and Sarah Fernandes. Aryan got a long hug from fellow competitor Faizan Zaki before leaving the stage.
“These kids put a lot of pressure on themselves. I think they get nervous. They get worried. They get more focused on, ‘What if I don’t make it? What if this happens? What if that happens?'” Walters said. “The kids feel it around them that, you know, they're being looked up to as previous finalists, previous semifinalists, and they internalize that people expect something from them.”
Aliyah Alpert, who finished ninth in 2022, missed the bee entirely last year because she flubbed the word recoup in the Yavapai County spelling bee in her home state of Arizona.
“It was on-list, I totally knew the word, but I blanked. Choked,” said 13-year-old Aliyah, who returned this year and was ousted in the semifinals.
Matthew Bader came in knowing he might not improve upon his finish last year, a tie for 57th.
“The farther you make it in the competition one year, that's the more chance you'll do worse next year,” said Matthew, a 14-year-old from Peachtree City, Georgia. “Actually, I didn’t really mind getting out. Win or lose, to be here, it’s a pretty big accomplishment.”
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
