By Aubree Amback / Staff writer
At their first competition, the spell bowl team received second place.
Spell bowl competitions are not like spelling bees, where competitors will say how to spell a word out loud. Instead, the participants in the spell bowl will be given a word and fifteen seconds to write it down.
Freshman Harper Graham spelled eight out of nine words correctly during the first competition.
“I’m pretty proud of myself because I’ve been doing spell bowl since third grade and that’s the highest I’ve ever achieved,” Graham said.
Compared to last year, participants in spell bowl think that the team works together a lot more this year.
“This year, I feel like we are a lot more team oriented. I feel like we are doing a lot better as a team, compared to last year which was more separated. But this year I feel like everyone came together a little bit more,” senior Juliana McDonald said.
The team has not been able to have many practices, because the participants have several other commitments during homeroom, taking away their practice time.
“We haven’t been doing a ton of practices this year since homeroom is usually taken by other things, but usually in a homeroom practice we would do board races. I’ll pick some tough words that I want them to have extra practice with because maybe they have a weird accent mark or a German word or they have a hyphen and I’ll say it out loud and the two people racing will try to write on the board first,” spell bowl coach Abigale Meyer said.
Mt. Vernon’s spell bowl team placed first during the first competition.
“We placed second and Mt. Vernon was first, and no one’s ever gotten close to Mt. Vernon before… No one’s been even close to beating Mt. Vernon because they’re always the people to get first place. We were that close. We lost by maybe four points in the last round,” McDonald said.
Their last competition was Nov. 3. This competition determined which teams advanced to state finals at Purdue. However, the Dragons placed 27th out of 43 total teams.
“I was stressed about the last competition because I didn’t know I was going to be on the competing roster, I thought I was going to be an extra. I didn’t know I was going to be competing until the day before, so that kind of stressed me out… I feel like as a team we were hopeful based on our scores from the first competition.” Graham said.
