LYNN — An eighth-grade student from Shrewsbury came out a winner after a nerve-wracking evening for the participants of the 36th Annual Daily Item Regional Spelling Bee, which took place in the Lynn Auditorium on Tuesday night.
“I feel great, very excited. I can’t believe I won,” said Saketh Madhusudhan, who attends Oak Middle School and became the best speller of the night among 31 Spelling Bee school champions from Eastern Massachusetts, after his last-standing opponent Adarsh Venkannagari from Acton misspelled the word “sciatica.”
Nevertheless, Madhusudhan was impressed by Venkannagari, a third-grader at Gates School in Acton, who was able to put up a fight for the three final rounds. Gabriella Dansereau from Medfield, also an eighth-grade student, came in third place.
Madhusudhan’s winning word was “brouhaha.” He will compete at the national level in Washington, D.C., in May.
Madhusudhan said he was nervous before the competition about how he would compare to other participants, but the words he had to spell on Tuesday night were not too bad. Madhusudhan previously was a Spelling Bee champion at his school in 2020, but he didn’t get to participate in the regional competition because it was canceled due to the onset of the COVID–19 pandemic.
Before the competition, 31 participants gathered with Joel and Mary Abramson, the main sponsors of the event, for a quick dinner and chat. The 2021 Regional Spelling Bee winner, Sanya Nadeem, 13, from Johnson Middle School in Walpole answered contestants’ last-minute questions about the competition and the tools she used to prepare.
Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson and Superintendent of Schools Dr. Patrick Tutwiler stopped by as well to encourage and congratulate students on their achievements.
With 15 girls and 16 boys participating, there was almost equal gender representation in the regional competition this year.
The contest commenced with the word “turtle,” but by the time the 17th participant took the spot at the microphone, the words got harder. Among the hardest words of the night were pendragon; lithophone; buffoonery; arborio; podunk; brethren; duplicitous; cerebellum; raclette; crustaceans; digerati; ablaut; wobulator; and dodecahedron.
The Spelling Bee competition Tuesday night was probably the only place where people would applaud the word “anxiety.” Contemporary words like selfie and vlogging made an appearance as well.
Different contestants took different approaches to cracking the words, from making sure to ask the pronouncer Walter Stone, assistant dean of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at North Shore Community College, allowed questions, to completely relying on luck and taking a chance. What distinguished Madhusudhan from other contestants was his methodical way of going through all of the allowed questions to the pronouncer and air-spelling each word on the back of his contestant number placard before giving the final answer.
Madhusudhan said that he had two weeks to study the list of about 500 words that was given to the Spelling Bee school champions after the online exam. To remember new words, Madhusudhan usually reads through them repeatedly.
Venkannagari said he was a little nervous and at the same time excited to compete against older students. He studied The Word Champs list to prepare and his mother was his coach.
The Abramsons partnered with the Item to sponsor the Regional Spelling Bee 10 years ago and the competition reached its peak in 2019 with 110 schools sending their best spellers.
“We are proud that a lot of our past participants have done very well at the national competition,” said Joel Abramson, a prominent Lynn entrepreneur and founder of the Lynn Education District.
He said that the spelling bee is a visual reflection of everything he and his wife stand for.
“My wife and I have always supported youth-oriented academic activities,” Abramson said. “At the spelling bee, you can see the results of the kids’ efforts right in front of your face, how much they studied, how seriously they took it, the commitment the parents and the teachers make. So it’s just an incredibly rewarding opportunity to give kids a chance to study hard, appreciate the results of their efforts by being on stage and meeting a lot of other kids, which they stay in contact with.”
The winner of the regional spelling bee receives a $100 Amazon gift card; round-trip airfare to Washington, D.C.; week-long hotel accommodations at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Forest Heights, Md.; and spending money for the winner and chaperone, all paid for by the Abramsons.
The competition was judged by Daily Item News Editor Gayla Cawley, Item contributor and former writer Steve Krause, and Stacy Drector, an English teacher from St. Mary’s School in Lynn.
Other sponsors of the event included the Item, The City of Lynn, Lynn Community Television, Olde Tyme Italian Restaurant, Dunkin’ Donuts, Lynn and Monte’s Pizza. Laurie Kennedy, City Councilor Dianna Chakoutis, Zachary Conti, Paula Villacreses and Ernie Carpenter volunteered their time for the event.
