![]() “I felt like in the moment I snapped out of a surreal dream.” Zaila Avant-garde hopes to play at Harvard, the WNBA and coach in the NBA So to actually win the whole thing was like a dream come true,” she told CNN’s “New Day” on Friday. “It felt really good to win because I have been working on it for like two years. ![]() She also collects a $50,000 prize for her win, which is pretty impressive considering she just began practicing for the event two years ago. With apologies to Game 2 of the NBA Finals, the best sporting event on Thursday night was the Scripps National Spelling Bee that saw 14-year-old Louisiana native, Zailia Avant-garde winning and making history at the same time.Īfter correctly spelling “Murraya,” Avant-garde became the first Black American to win the event in 93 competitions. The only previous black champion was also the only international winner - Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica in 1998.Zaila Avant-garde became the first Black American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee in nearly 100 years of competitions, but spelling is just her side hustle. Zaila's win breaks a streak of at least one Indian-American champion every year since 2008. "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." She basically knew the definition of every word that we did, like pretty much verbatim," he said. "She really just had a much different approach than any speller I've ever seen. That is 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. She progressed quickly enough to make it to the nationals in 2019 but bowed out in the preliminary rounds. Zaila only started a few years ago after her father, Jawara Spacetime, watched the competition and realised his daughter's affinity for doing complicated maths in her head could translate well to spelling. ![]() "I can go out, like my Guinness World Records, just leave it right there, and walk off." "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. The 14-year-old from Louisiana 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. "I don't know, there's just some words, for a speller, I just get them and I can't get them right."Īfter the tournament was cancelled in 2020, Zaila considered stopping her spelling, which she described as a side hobby despite practising for seven hours a day. Pausing at the unstressed sound in the middle of word, she collected herself, started again, and nailed the second "e". The 14-year-old only looked troubled with her second-last word, Nepeta, another plant genus. "I was pretty relaxed on the subject of Murraya and pretty much any other word I got," she said. Zaila claimed the $US50,000 ($67,210) top prize, jumping and twirling with joy, only flinching in surprise when confetti was shot onto the stage. Televised live on sports channel ESPN, the competition finals returned after being cancelled last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Zaila Avant-garde won by correctly spelling Murraya, a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees.
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